Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, vehicles are ridden and beverages is sipped, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh power to expand the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her fate are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her personal quest to reconnect with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell independence of thinking, originality and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that seem to lead to different dimensions. An example of a portal appears to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, yet, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical tussle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
