Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and drinks is consumed, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in search of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh power to expand the institution's control. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The oil is regarded by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a broader war with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the unveiling of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: gateways that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such window manifests to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
