Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound authority to expand the church's rule. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is seen by some as a tradeable product, by different parties as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inextricably connected with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her path are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the world. Her personal journey to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell freedom of thought, innovation and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that look to give on to other worlds. An example of a opening appears to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these openings as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict reason and return to instinct, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic tussle between innocence and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
