Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and determined main character of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to broaden the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her destiny are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a wider war with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell autonomy of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
