Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring 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". Power is shifting from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl 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 distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound power to extend the church's rule. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable commodity, by others as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to suppress freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the finding of a collection of unusual fissures in the fabric of the Earth's sky: windows that look to open into alternate realities. One such window appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict reason and return to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
