Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to extend the institution's dominium. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by others as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. As in the original series, her movements and her fate are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to reconnect with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to suppress autonomy of reason, creativity and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to open into alternate realities. One such portal appears to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a threat to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
