Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are populated with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and tea is sipped, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and determined heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the church's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to a key location to learn more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her destiny are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the finding of a set of unusual cracks in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that appear to open into alternate realities. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible logic and return to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
