Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, 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 firm and strong are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but below, buses are taken and tea is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like the original series, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are shown to be deeply woven with the future of the universe. Her individual journey to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a broader battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities always have, is striving to stifle independence of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the discovery of a collection of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that appear to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these portals as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict logic and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
