Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just 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 concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are taken and tea is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound influence to expand the religion's rule. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to find out more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by others as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader conflict with an oppressive system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such window appears to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid reason and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between purity and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the