Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the heavens are populated with witches and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's control. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by others as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are shown to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her private quest to reunite with her soul and regain her vision becomes the central conflict in a broader conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to suppress freedom of thought, innovation and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the discovery of a series of strange openings in the fabric of the world's sky: gateways that appear to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its head, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be protected – that their significance and their value is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between purity and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
