Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is drunk, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply connected with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is attempting to suppress independence of reason, creativity and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the fabric of the planet's air: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal seems to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict logic and return to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between purity and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
