Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the church's governing body, and is set on using his fresh power to expand the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply connected with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her path are revealed to be deeply woven with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story begins with the finding of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the world's air: gateways that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular window manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
