Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the original series, her movements and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her individual quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger war with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell independence of thought, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the world's air: portals that seem to give on to other worlds. A particular portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these openings as a challenge to the church's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict logic and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is somehow vital – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
