Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."
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 resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The oil is seen by some as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the original series, Lyra's movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the planet's air: windows that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular opening manifests to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these windows as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
