Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the skies are populated with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and determined heroine of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more careful, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by some as a marketable product, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story opens with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the structure of the world's sky: portals that look to give on to other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict rationalism and return to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
