Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound influence to broaden the religion's rule. A key character, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her personal quest to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a wider battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to suppress autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the finding of a set of curious openings in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible reason and return to instinct, yet, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
