Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and drinks is consumed, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his newfound authority to extend the church's control. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to the city to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and regain her vision becomes the central conflict in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the unveiling of a set of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's sky: gateways that seem to open into other worlds. One such portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between naivety and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
