Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (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 picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's control. A key character, who saved young the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by some as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's actions and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the finding of a set of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: portals that seem to lead to other worlds. One such portal appears to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and return to feeling, however, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is somehow essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
