Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which appears somehow to be the source of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a wider battle with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to stifle independence of thinking, innovation and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story starts with the finding of a collection of curious openings in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic struggle between innocence and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
