Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to expand the church's control. Another protagonist, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of reason, innovation and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a collection of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to open into alternate realities. A particular portal appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the church's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible reason and back to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
