Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and determined heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound power to extend the institution's dominium. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her destiny are revealed to be deeply woven with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an oppressive system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's air: gateways that appear to open into alternate realities. One such opening appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these portals as a challenge to the church's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and revert to feeling, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
