Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and tea is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's choices and her fate are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her private journey to reunite with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to suppress freedom of reason, creativity and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid rationalism and revert to instinct, yet, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
