🔗 Share this article

Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are taken and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a social and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.

Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe

In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, her actions and her path are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and regain her vision becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, creativity and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The novel begins with the finding of a series of unusual openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that seem to give on to other worlds. One such portal seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, designates these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid logic and return to feeling, yet, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is established.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the