🔗 Share this article

Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and beverages is sipped, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh authority to extend the religion's control. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in the first series, Lyra's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm

In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply woven with the destiny of the realm. Her personal mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger war with an oppressive government which, as these systems always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of reason, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts

The novel begins with the finding of a collection of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between purity and maturity is established.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

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