Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives this final volume, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and tea is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound influence to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable product, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her private journey to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities always have, is striving to suppress independence of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story opens with the discovery of a collection of strange cracks in the fabric of the planet's sky: gateways that appear to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, designates these portals as a challenge to the church's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict rationalism and return to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
