Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh power to expand the religion's control. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her individual quest to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to stifle independence of thought, creativity and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book opens with the finding of a series of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that appear to lead to other worlds. A particular portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously vital – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
