Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and determined heroine of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh power to extend the institution's dominium. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the key battleground in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such authorities always have, is striving to stifle independence of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story begins with the finding of a collection of strange openings in the structure of the world's sky: gateways that appear to lead to other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible reason and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way vital – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
