Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to extend the church's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by some as a tradeable good, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her destiny are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger war with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to quell autonomy of reason, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the finding of a series of curious openings in the fabric of the world's sky: portals that seem to open into other worlds. One such portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between purity and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
