Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and tea is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound authority to broaden the religion's dominium. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by some as a commercial good, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her fate are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her private quest to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the finding of a collection of curious cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that look to open into different dimensions. A particular portal seems to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The church, with its leader at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and return to feeling, however, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between purity and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
