Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and beverages is consumed, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound influence to expand the institution's dominium. A key character, who saved young Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to a key location to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which seems in some way to be the source of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The substance is regarded by some as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her fate are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the unveiling of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the world's sky: gateways that look to lead to different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these portals as a threat to the religion's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict logic and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
