Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and drinks is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh influence to expand the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by some as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are shown to be inextricably woven with the future of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, creativity and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the discovery of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the church's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
