Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the air are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound power to extend the church's rule. A key character, who carried baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by some as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her private journey to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to suppress autonomy of reason, innovation and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story starts with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. One such portal manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict rationalism and return to instinct, yet, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
