Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound influence to broaden the institution's control. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is seen by certain groups as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her path are shown to be deeply woven with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to reconnect with her soul and regain her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an oppressive regime which, as these systems always have, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, innovation and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the finding of a series of curious cracks in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to give on to other worlds. A particular portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible reason and revert to feeling, yet, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
