Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are taken and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to extend the institution's control. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her personal journey to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to stifle independence of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the unveiling of a series of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and revert to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
