Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and determined heroine of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, warier, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to expand the religion's rule. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which appears in some way to be the cause of a social and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The oil is seen by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the fate of the world. Her private mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger battle with an controlling government which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the finding of a series of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that look to lead to other worlds. An example of a opening manifests to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible logic and revert to instinct, yet, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
