Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an oppressive regime which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to quell autonomy of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the unveiling of a set of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that appear to give on to other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid reason and return to feeling, yet, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between naivety and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
