Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound authority to expand the institution's control. A key character, who saved young the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a larger battle with an oppressive government which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to quell freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the planet's sky: windows that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a window seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a threat to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to instinct, yet, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between purity and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
