Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are ridden and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the religion's control. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell freedom of thought, innovation and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story opens with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. A particular opening manifests to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic conflict between innocence and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
