Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight 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 carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but below, transports are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and determined main character of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to extend the institution's rule. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable good, by others as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the original series, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell freedom of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the discovery of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: windows that appear to give on to other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict rationalism and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic tussle between naivety and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
