Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to expand the religion's control. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a larger war with an controlling government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to stifle independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the finding of a set of unusual fissures in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
