Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in beast form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, transports are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to find out more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her personal journey to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to suppress autonomy of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the discovery of a set of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that look to give on to other worlds. A particular window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these portals as a threat to the church's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to instinct, however, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
