Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are ridden and drinks is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more careful, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her private journey to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. One such opening manifests to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical conflict between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
