Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are caught and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound influence to broaden the church's control. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which seems somehow to be the source of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to reunite with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is striving to suppress autonomy of thought, creativity and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book starts with the unveiling of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these portals as a challenge to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and return to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow vital – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between purity and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
