Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are ridden and beverages is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound influence to broaden the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable product, by others as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the central battleground in a larger war with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: gateways that look to lead to different dimensions. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict rationalism and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
