Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more careful, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried infant the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by some as a marketable product, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are shown to be inextricably woven with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central battleground in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the discovery of a series of strange openings in the makeup of the planet's sky: portals that seem to give on to other worlds. One such window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these openings as a threat to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict logic and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between innocence and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
