Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the church's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to expand the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to discover more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the original series, Lyra's actions and her fate are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell independence of reason, innovation and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a series of curious cracks in the makeup of the world's air: windows that seem to give on to other worlds. A particular window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
