🔗 Share this article

Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."

Key Puzzle and Her Quest

Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's final excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh power to expand the religion's control. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.

Similar to the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the world

In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her actions and her path are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive regime which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, innovation and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The story begins with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. One such opening seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and return to feeling, however, her conviction 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 creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is set.

Story Tempo and Character Development

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the