Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst 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 may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh power to broaden the religion's control. A key character, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe. Her individual journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger war with an controlling government which, as such authorities always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, originality and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the finding of a set of unusual fissures in the makeup of the planet's sky: portals that appear to give on to alternate realities. A particular window seems to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these windows as a threat to the institution's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible reason and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
