Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but older, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw 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, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a wider battle with an controlling system which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, creativity and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: windows that appear to give on to other worlds. One such opening manifests to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and back to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
