Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst 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 seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound power to extend the religion's control. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the original series, her movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to reunite with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the world's air: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. One such portal manifests to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is in some way vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
