Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and beverages is consumed, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's rule. A key character, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the key conflict in a wider battle with an oppressive system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the unveiling of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the world's air: portals that look to give on to alternate realities. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their significance and their value is somehow vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between purity and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
