Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and beverages is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh power to expand the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable product, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book begins with the discovery of a series of curious fissures in the structure of the world's sky: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such opening manifests to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a challenge to the church's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her belief that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between purity and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
