Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to learn more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her path are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the key struggle in a larger war with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a set of strange openings in the makeup of the world's air: portals that seem to open into other worlds. One such portal appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible logic and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is in some way vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between naivety and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
