Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in creature form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is seen by some as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her choices and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe. Her individual quest to reunite with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to stifle independence of reason, innovation and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the unveiling of a set of unusual fissures in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to lead to different dimensions. An example of a opening appears to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, designates these openings as a challenge to the church's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict reason and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
