Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but below, transports are caught and tea is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and determined main character of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to expand the institution's rule. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her path are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a larger war with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's air: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these openings as a challenge to the church's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible reason and back to feeling, however, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
