Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the skies are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and drinks is drunk, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, warier, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The substance is seen by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her personal quest to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story starts with the unveiling of a series of strange fissures in the structure of the world's sky: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such window seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid reason and revert to instinct, however, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
