Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original 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 protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound influence to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her path are shown to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her personal quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the key conflict in a wider battle with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the unveiling of a series of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to open into different dimensions. A particular window manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these openings as a challenge to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid reason and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and their value is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between purity and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
