Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider battle with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious fissures in the structure of the planet's sky: windows that look to give on to different dimensions. An example of a window appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to feeling, yet, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way vital – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
