Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and drinks is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant Lyra to security along a flooded river as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle 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 viewed by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her path are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the finding of a collection of unusual openings in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into other worlds. One such opening seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a threat to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean tussle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
