Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, 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 giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are ridden and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to expand the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the original series, the protagonist's actions and her path are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a series of curious cracks in the structure of the planet's air: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. A particular portal appears to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean tussle between purity and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
