Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and drinks is drunk, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's control. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is viewed by some as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her destiny are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an oppressive government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's sky: portals that look to give on to alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is in some way crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
