Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound influence to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is seen by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. One such portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these windows as a threat to the institution's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical struggle between innocence and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
