Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her path are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of thought, creativity and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the discovery of a set of unusual cracks in the structure of the Earth's air: gateways that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these portals as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and return to feeling, however, her belief that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously vital – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
