Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, transports are caught and tea is sipped, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh influence to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and financial crisis emanating out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a larger war with an oppressive government which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thinking, innovation and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the discovery of a set of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: portals that seem to give on to other worlds. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and return to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
