Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this 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 skies are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and determined main character of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in quest of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a wider war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to quell freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the discovery of a collection of curious cracks in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that seem to lead to other worlds. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
