Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is regarded by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they come together. As in the original series, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her individual journey to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the central battleground in a broader battle with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell freedom of thinking, creativity and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious openings in the structure of the world's atmosphere: portals that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening appears to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her belief that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between purity and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
