Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to extend the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried young Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the original series, her choices and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her personal mission to reconnect with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive government which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story begins with the finding of a collection of unusual cracks in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that look to give on to other worlds. One such portal seems to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between innocence and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
