Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh power to extend the church's dominium. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from that area. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the original series, Lyra's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a series of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's air: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. One such portal manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from strict rationalism and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
