Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to extend the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable product, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's actions and her fate are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: portals that seem to lead to other worlds. A particular portal manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these portals as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
