Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are ridden and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh influence to broaden the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to security along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Like the original series, her movements and her path are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the discovery of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to give on to different dimensions. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict reason and revert to instinct, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is in some way vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
