Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, warier, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh influence to expand the religion's control. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from that area. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the original series, her choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider battle with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to quell autonomy of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book starts with the discovery of a collection of curious fissures in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that look to give on to other worlds. One such opening manifests to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these windows as a threat to the church's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
