Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's High Council, and is set on using his fresh influence to extend the church's control. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by certain groups as a marketable good, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to suppress independence of reason, innovation and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the finding of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the world's air: gateways that appear to lead to alternate realities. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
