Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to extend the church's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the source of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal journey to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to stifle autonomy of thinking, creativity and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the unveiling of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the planet's sky: portals that seem to open into other worlds. One such opening manifests to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these openings as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and return to feeling, yet, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic tussle between innocence and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
