Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply connected with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her path are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her individual mission to reunite with her soul and regain her vision becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an oppressive regime which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to suppress autonomy of thought, creativity and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the finding of a series of curious fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that look to lead to other worlds. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict logic and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
