Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The oil is regarded by some as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the world. Her personal mission to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a larger conflict with an oppressive system which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to quell freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a collection of unusual openings in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening manifests to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, classifies these portals as a threat to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid logic and return to feeling, yet, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between naivety and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
