Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and determined main character of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in quest of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the church's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the church's rule. A key character, who saved infant Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the original series, Lyra's choices and her path are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the realm. Her individual mission to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to quell freedom of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the finding of a collection of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. One such window appears to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between naivety and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
