Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in beast form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and tea is consumed, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and determined heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's control. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply connected with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, her actions and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to stifle autonomy of thinking, innovation and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the discovery of a series of curious cracks in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that look to open into different dimensions. A particular window appears to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these portals as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between naivety and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
