Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his fresh power to expand the institution's control. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from that area. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm. Her personal quest to reunite with her companion and regain her vision becomes the primary struggle in a broader battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the unveiling of a set of strange openings in the structure of the planet's air: gateways that look to lead to other worlds. One such window seems to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
