Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and determined main character of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh authority to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which seems in some way to be the source of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her private quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a broader war with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the planet's air: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its helm, designates these windows as a threat to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and return to instinct, however, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic tussle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
