🔗 Share this article

Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are faltering and failing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is consumed, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and determined heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to go off in search of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.

As in the first series, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the fate of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the original series, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the world. Her personal mission to reconnect with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider battle with an controlling regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to suppress independence of thinking, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The novel begins with the finding of a set of unusual fissures in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict reason and back to instinct, however, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is in some way vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic conflict between innocence and experience is set.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the