When openings are cut between different universes – a major plot device in His Dark Materials – Dust leaks out, and the ecology of all the worlds involved is ruinously affected. It is Dust that enables the working of the “alethiometer” – the truth-telling instrument that operates by the alignment of layers of images superimposed on each other, like a kind of mechanical I Ching (the comparison with the Chinese divination technique is explicitly made in the third of the earlier trilogy) or tarot pack. In the earlier His Dark Materials trilogy, Pullman developed with increasing complexity the idea of “Dust” as something like the animating power of adult imagination. “Nothing is just anything,” says one of the characters towards the end of this new excursion into Philip Pullman’s wonderfully imagined parallel universe.
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