Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his fresh influence to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a social and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her private journey to reunite with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems always have, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the finding of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: portals that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a challenge to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
