Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are taken and beverages is consumed, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's dominium. A key character, who saved young the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell independence of thinking, innovation and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book opens with the finding of a set of strange openings in the structure of the world's sky: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these portals as a threat to the church's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible reason and return to feeling, however, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
