Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is sipped, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to extend the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her path are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to lead to alternate realities. A particular portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict logic and back to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is in some way vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
