Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and tea is sipped, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and persistent main character of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to extend the institution's rule. A key character, who saved young Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like the original series, her actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the universe. Her individual quest to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to quell independence of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a collection of strange cracks in the structure of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to open into alternate realities. A particular window seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic struggle between innocence and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
