Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are ridden and drinks is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which appears somehow to be the source of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the central struggle in a wider battle with an oppressive system which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress freedom of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the discovery of a collection of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these openings as a threat to the institution's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict reason and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
