Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. As in the first trilogy, her actions and her destiny are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal mission to rejoin with her soul and regain her vision becomes the key conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, innovation and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the discovery of a collection of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that seem to lead to other worlds. One such opening seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict rationalism and back to feeling, however, her belief that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
