Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and tea is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and determined main character of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to expand the church's rule. A key character, who carried young the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the original series, her actions and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her personal journey to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a wider battle with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to stifle independence of thought, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a set of unusual fissures in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that seem to open into different dimensions. One such portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
