Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the church's control. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable commodity, by others as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the realm. Her private quest to reunite with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader war with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book starts with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the world's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, classifies these openings as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
