Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and tea is consumed, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of strict, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to the city to find out more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her actions and her path are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her private journey to reconnect with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to suppress freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the fabric of the world's sky: portals that seem to lead to other worlds. One such window seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its head, designates these windows as a threat to the church's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
