Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and beverages is sipped, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by various factions as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the planet's air: gateways that seem to give on to alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these openings as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean conflict between purity and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
