Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and determined heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to broaden the religion's rule. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is regarded by some as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the original series, her movements and her fate are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world. Her personal mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a broader conflict with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to suppress autonomy of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story starts with the finding of a collection of strange openings in the fabric of the planet's sky: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. An example of a window seems to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these portals as a problem to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
