Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her path are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her personal mission to reconnect with her companion and regain her vision becomes the primary battleground in a larger war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thinking, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these openings as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid logic and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
