Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to expand the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried young Lyra to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a commercial product, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the destiny of the universe. Her personal mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the discovery of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular portal appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid rationalism and return to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
