Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and drinks is consumed, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to a key location to find out more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which appears in some way to be the cause of a social and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the original series, Lyra's actions and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her private journey to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to stifle independence of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that look to open into different dimensions. One such opening seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, labels these portals as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to intuition, however, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between purity and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
