Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, transports are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the religion's control. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to the city to find out more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from the region. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are shown to be deeply connected with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her destiny are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a broader battle with an authoritarian government which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the finding of a set of curious cracks in the structure of the Earth's sky: gateways that look to lead to alternate realities. A particular opening manifests to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a problem to the religion's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and revert to feeling, yet, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical struggle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
