Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and determined main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is seen by various factions as a tradeable product, by different parties as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her fate are revealed to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual quest to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a broader conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, innovation and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the discovery of a set of unusual fissures in the structure of the Earth's sky: gateways that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, labels these portals as a challenge to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
