Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and drinks is consumed, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and determined heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound authority to expand the institution's rule. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which appears in some way to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to suppress independence of reason, innovation and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book opens with the discovery of a set of unusual fissures in the structure of the planet's air: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its helm, classifies these portals as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
