Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to expand the church's rule. A key character, who saved young the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's movements and her destiny are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a broader conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the finding of a series of strange openings in the fabric of the world's sky: windows that seem to open into other worlds. One such opening seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible reason and revert to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously vital – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
