Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the central conflict in a wider war with an controlling regime which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story begins with the discovery of a collection of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such opening appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its helm, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict logic and back to feeling, yet, her belief that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is in some way crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
