Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the church's dominium. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, her choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the future of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, innovation and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story opens with the discovery of a collection of curious openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such portal appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid logic and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
