Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child 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 adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound influence to broaden the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about his aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by others as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her destiny are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the universe. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a wider battle with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of thinking, innovation and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to lead to different dimensions. A particular opening seems to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid logic and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
