🔗 Share this article

Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and failing."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to leave in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.

As in the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the original series, her choices and her fate are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to stifle independence of reason, innovation and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The book begins with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to lead to alternate realities. A particular window appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these openings as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid reason and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the