Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in quest of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to extend the institution's control. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The oil is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Like the original series, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the discovery of a set of curious cracks in the structure of the world's sky: portals that look to give on to alternate realities. One such window seems to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these openings as a challenge to the church's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict rationalism and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously vital – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between purity and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
