Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and beverages is sipped, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in search of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the institution's rule. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to find out more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply connected with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are shown to be deeply woven with the fate of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger war with an controlling government which, as such regimes always have, is striving to suppress independence of reason, creativity and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the unveiling of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's air: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. One such window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic struggle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
