Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are ridden and drinks is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh influence to extend the church's control. A key character, who carried baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by others as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her fate are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm. Her private quest to rejoin with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an oppressive system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to suppress autonomy of reason, originality and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the planet's sky: portals that appear to open into alternate realities. A particular window manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its head, classifies these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and return to instinct, yet, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and their value is in some way essential – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between innocence and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
