Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are taken and drinks is consumed, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable good, by others as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her path are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe. Her personal mission to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to suppress independence of thought, creativity and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the discovery of a collection of strange openings in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such opening seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible reason and back to feeling, however, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their significance and their value is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic struggle between innocence and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
