Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and determined heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, warier, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The substance is seen by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her destiny are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the key conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, originality and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book opens with the finding of a series of strange openings in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that appear to give on to alternate realities. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict rationalism and back to instinct, yet, her belief that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
