Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's control. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to stifle autonomy of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious openings in the structure of the world's air: portals that look to give on to different dimensions. A particular portal appears to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and revert to instinct, yet, her belief that these places must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is in some way vital – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, 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
