🔗 Share this article

Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are faltering and giving way."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but below, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable good, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

Like the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her fate are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, innovation and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The novel starts with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that seem to lead to other worlds. One such window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the