Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from the region. The substance is seen by some as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they merge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private quest to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a larger battle with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes always have, is striving to stifle freedom of thinking, creativity and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the finding of a collection of strange cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into other worlds. A particular window seems to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these portals as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid logic and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
