Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to security along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the original series, her choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her individual quest to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a broader conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the unveiling of a series of curious openings in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: portals that look to open into different dimensions. One such opening manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict reason and return to instinct, however, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
