Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and beverages is sipped, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to the city to discover more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable product, by others as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a larger battle with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is striving to stifle autonomy of thought, creativity and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a series of unusual openings in the structure of the world's air: windows that appear to open into other worlds. One such portal appears to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible rationalism and return to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
