Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and beverages is sipped, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial commodity, by others as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world. Her personal journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to quell autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story starts with the finding of a set of curious cracks in the fabric of the planet's sky: portals that appear to lead to different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, labels these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between naivety and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
