Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and drinks is consumed, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is viewed by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's actions and her fate are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm. Her personal journey to reunite with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the central battleground in a larger war with an controlling regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the finding of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such opening appears to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
