Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound influence to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, the heroine's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Like the original series, her choices and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her personal journey to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the key struggle in a larger war with an controlling government which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to quell autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the finding of a set of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's sky: gateways that look to open into other worlds. One such opening appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid reason and return to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is in some way vital – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
