Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's control. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to security along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to a key location to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by various factions as a tradeable product, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply connected with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's actions and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to suppress independence of thought, innovation and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the discovery of a series of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that appear to open into alternate realities. One such opening manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the religion's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic tussle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
