Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound influence to extend the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable good, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the original series, the protagonist's movements and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a wider war with an oppressive system which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to quell independence of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story opens with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the fabric of the planet's sky: gateways that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these openings as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean conflict between innocence and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
