Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the realm. Her private journey to reunite with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader conflict with an oppressive government which, as such authorities always have, is striving to stifle autonomy of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book begins with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. An example of a portal appears to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict reason and revert to instinct, yet, her certainty that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
