Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are taken and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to the city to learn more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world. Her personal journey to reconnect with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to stifle freedom of thought, originality and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious fissures in the makeup of the planet's sky: portals that seem to give on to other worlds. An example of a portal appears to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict logic and return to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their significance and their value is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
