Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are ridden and drinks is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to extend the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is regarded by some as a tradeable good, by others as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to quell independence of thinking, creativity and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a set of unusual openings in the fabric of the world's sky: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. A particular opening appears to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict reason and return to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is in some way vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic conflict between naivety and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
