Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, 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 child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to the city to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the original series, her choices and her path are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to reunite with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a larger war with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to stifle independence of reason, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book begins with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these portals as a threat to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
