Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to expand the religion's control. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected 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 future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader war with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the discovery of a series of strange openings in the structure of the world's air: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical tussle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
