Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound influence to expand the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The extract is viewed by some as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her path are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story starts with the discovery of a set of unusual fissures in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: portals that appear to open into other worlds. One such opening manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic tussle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
