Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the church's rule. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to find out more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from that area. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the original series, her actions and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her personal quest to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a broader battle with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell independence of reason, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story begins with the unveiling of a set of curious openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. One such portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these openings as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between naivety and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
