Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's control. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her destiny are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her personal quest to reconnect with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to quell independence of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the finding of a set of strange openings in the structure of the world's air: windows that look to lead to alternate realities. A particular opening appears to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, however, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way essential – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
