Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are ridden and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers 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 flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe. Her personal quest to reunite with her companion and regain her vision becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle independence of reason, originality and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the Earth's sky: portals that look to open into other worlds. One such window appears to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible logic and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between purity and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the