Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting 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 accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the air are populated with witches and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's rule. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably woven with the future of the realm. Her private quest to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a broader conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to quell freedom of reason, innovation and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story opens with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that appear to open into other worlds. An example of a opening appears to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and back to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and their value is mysteriously vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic tussle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
