Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is sipped, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her fate are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities always have, is striving to stifle independence of thinking, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that look to lead to alternate realities. One such window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these openings as a problem to the religion's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict logic and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously vital – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
