🔗 Share this article

Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and failing."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and determined main character of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, warier, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to leave in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to expand the church's dominium. A key character, who saved baby Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The oil is regarded by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.

Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world

In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her personal journey to reunite with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the key conflict in a wider battle with an oppressive government which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to suppress independence of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The novel starts with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that appear to open into different dimensions. One such opening manifests to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these windows as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is established.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the