Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to expand the religion's rule. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the world. Her private journey to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger battle with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the unveiling of a collection of curious openings in the structure of the world's sky: windows that seem to lead to different dimensions. One such opening appears to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible rationalism and return to feeling, yet, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
