Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are caught and beverages is sipped, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's High Council, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's control. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like the original series, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the unveiling of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: windows that look to give on to different dimensions. A particular portal appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these openings as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict logic and return to instinct, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
