Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered 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 The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound influence to expand the church's control. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The oil is seen by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress freedom of reason, creativity and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the finding of a set of unusual cracks in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a threat to the church's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid logic and revert to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between purity and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
