Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound influence to broaden the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old 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 the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a commercial product, by others as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her fate are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe. Her personal mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, innovation and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to open into alternate realities. One such window seems to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, classifies these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and return to feeling, yet, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between purity and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
