Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling 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 flowing away from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby 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 tenacious main character of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to the city to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a larger battle with an oppressive government which, as these systems always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story opens with the unveiling of a set of unusual openings in the structure of the world's sky: gateways that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, labels these portals as a threat to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
