🔗 Share this article

Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and failing."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are caught and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound influence to broaden the church's control. Another protagonist, who carried infant the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm

In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her path are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her private quest to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a broader battle with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to stifle independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The novel opens with the unveiling of a collection of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. One such window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

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