Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her fate are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the finding of a set of curious cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. A particular opening seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its head, classifies these portals as a threat to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between innocence and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
