Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which appears somehow to be the source of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from the region. The oil is regarded by some as a tradeable good, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her personal mission to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a wider battle with an oppressive system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to suppress autonomy of reason, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the finding of a collection of curious cracks in the structure of the world's sky: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such window seems to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
