🔗 Share this article

Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and failing."

Key Puzzle and Her Quest

Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the church's rule. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to security along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from that area. The oil is seen by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.

As in the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world

In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her personal journey to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader battle with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The story begins with the finding of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the planet's air: gateways that appear to give on to alternate realities. A particular window seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these portals as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid rationalism and back to feeling, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between naivety and knowledge is established.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the