Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh influence to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued baby Lyra to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader battle with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to quell independence of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the unveiling of a set of unusual fissures in the structure of the world's sky: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. One such window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these portals as a threat to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is somehow vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
