Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in beast form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's control. A key character, who carried baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm. Her personal quest to reunite with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the key battleground in a wider battle with an oppressive government which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of thought, innovation and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to give on to other worlds. One such portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
