Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the skies are populated with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe. Her private quest to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the discovery of a collection of unusual fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that look to give on to other worlds. One such window appears to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible reason and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between naivety and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
