Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the church's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's rule. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her path are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her personal journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling system which, as such authorities always have, is striving to stifle freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the discovery of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that appear to open into alternate realities. A particular portal seems to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict reason and return to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
