Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh power to extend the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the key struggle in a broader battle with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, innovation and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the unveiling of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's sky: windows that appear to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
