🔗 Share this article

Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and giving way."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to the city to find out more about his aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from the region. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the world

In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her path are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and regain her vision becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to quell independence of reason, originality and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The book begins with the finding of a collection of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's air: windows that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such portal manifests to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these portals as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict rationalism and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the