Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's control. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to find out more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe. Her private journey to reunite with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the unveiling of a set of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's sky: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean conflict between innocence and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
