Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his fresh power to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a commercial good, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like the original series, her choices and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an oppressive government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of thinking, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story opens with the discovery of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the world's air: windows that appear to open into other worlds. An example of a opening appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these openings as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and back to instinct, yet, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, 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 naivety and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
