Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are taken and beverages is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in quest of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his newfound influence to expand the church's dominium. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her destiny are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her individual quest to reconnect with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to suppress freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the discovery of a collection of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: portals that appear to lead to other worlds. One such opening manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these openings as a challenge to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical struggle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
