Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered 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 mature individual: still clearly the sharp and determined heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh power to expand the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to reunite with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is striving to quell autonomy of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a set of curious openings in the fabric of the world's sky: gateways that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such portal appears to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, yet, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is in some way vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
