Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to extend the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Like the original series, her choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the realm. Her personal journey to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, innovation and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the discovery of a set of strange openings in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to alternate realities. A particular portal seems to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
