Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels this final volume, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh power to expand the religion's control. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her path are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a larger war with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell autonomy of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book begins with the unveiling of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the planet's air: windows that appear to open into other worlds. A particular opening manifests to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and return to feeling, however, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
