Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his newfound power to broaden the religion's rule. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's actions and her fate are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the central conflict in a broader battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress independence of thought, innovation and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story starts with the discovery of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that seem to give on to other worlds. One such opening appears to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously vital – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
