Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in creature form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound power to expand the institution's dominium. A key character, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river 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 Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply connected with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her private mission to reconnect with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger war with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the discovery of a set of curious openings in the structure of the planet's sky: windows that appear to open into other worlds. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
