Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The oil is regarded by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be inseparably woven with the fate of the realm. Her personal journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to quell autonomy of reason, innovation and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the discovery of a series of curious fissures in the structure of the Earth's air: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such opening appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, designates these portals as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
