Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in search of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound influence to expand the institution's control. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a broader battle with an controlling system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle autonomy of reason, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the unveiling of a series of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: portals that seem to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
