Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and beverages is sipped, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the church's rule. A key character, who saved infant Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by some as a tradeable good, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger battle with an controlling government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of thought, creativity and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious fissures in the structure of the world's sky: windows that appear to lead to other worlds. A particular opening seems to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these portals as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to instinct, yet, her belief that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
