Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is sipped, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to extend the church's dominium. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in the original series, her actions and her path are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, creativity and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story starts with the discovery of a collection of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and return to feeling, however, her belief that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic struggle between purity and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
