Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel 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". Power is draining from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and beverages is consumed, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to expand the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The oil is seen by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a wider conflict with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of thought, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the discovery of a collection of strange openings in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that appear to open into other worlds. One such portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their significance and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical conflict between innocence and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
