Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in the original series, her movements and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the key struggle in a larger conflict with an oppressive system which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to quell independence of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story opens with the discovery of a series of curious cracks in the makeup of the world's air: gateways that appear to open into different dimensions. An example of a window appears to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict logic and return to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
