🔗 Share this article

Tings are unraveling 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 intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."

Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but below, buses are taken and drinks is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and persistent main character of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.

As in the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her destiny are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the key conflict in a wider war with an controlling system which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to suppress independence of reason, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The story starts with the unveiling of a set of curious cracks in the fabric of the planet's air: windows that look to give on to other worlds. A particular portal seems to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is prepared.

Narrative Pacing and Character Development

At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the