Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the church's rule. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to quell freedom of reason, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book opens with the finding of a collection of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that appear to lead to different dimensions. An example of a opening appears to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and their value is somehow vital – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
