Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound power to broaden the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The oil is regarded by some as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her destiny are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private quest to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a set of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's air: portals that seem to lead to alternate realities. One such portal appears to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between naivety and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
