Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the institution's control. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The extract is regarded by some as a commercial good, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the realm. Her private journey to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress autonomy of reason, creativity and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the world's atmosphere: gateways that seem to open into alternate realities. One such opening appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
