Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original 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 recognisably the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh influence to extend the church's rule. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the central conflict in a wider war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the planet's air: portals that look to give on to other worlds. An example of a opening seems to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, yet, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
