Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by some as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her path are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, creativity and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story starts with the finding of a series of unusual openings in the fabric of the world's air: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between innocence and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
