Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more careful, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that seem to open into other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the church's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid reason and return to feeling, yet, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic tussle between innocence and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
