Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less sure. 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.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in search of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's control. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger battle with an oppressive government which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to quell independence of reason, creativity and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that look to give on to different dimensions. A particular opening seems to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to feeling, yet, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow vital – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
