Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in search of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's dominium. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her individual journey to reconnect with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling government which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to stifle independence of thinking, innovation and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: portals that look to give on to other worlds. A particular portal appears to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict logic and back to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is somehow vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic tussle between purity and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
