Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels this final volume, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound authority to extend the institution's rule. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from that area. The extract is regarded by some as a commercial commodity, by others as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a set of curious openings in the fabric of the world's air: gateways that appear to give on to alternate realities. A particular opening seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the church's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between naivety and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
