Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by some as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her choices and her fate are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her companion and regain her vision becomes the central battleground in a broader battle with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the finding of a series of curious cracks in the makeup of the world's air: windows that look to open into alternate realities. A particular portal appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, labels these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
