Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh power to expand the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by some as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Like the original series, Lyra's choices and her path are shown to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to suppress independence of reason, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the fabric of the world's air: gateways that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between naivety and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
