Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the religion's rule. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about his aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a social and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The substance is seen by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of thought, innovation and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
