Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound power to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to learn more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from the region. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her fate are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the key struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to stifle independence of thought, originality and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. A particular window seems to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and revert to intuition, however, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
