Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the world. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider conflict with an authoritarian government which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to quell autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the unveiling of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's air: windows that appear to open into other worlds. One such portal seems to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict logic and back to intuition, yet, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
