Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to the city to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by some as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her personal journey to rejoin with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to suppress freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to alternate realities. A particular opening seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to feeling, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between innocence and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
