Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the church's control. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to find out more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable product, by different parties as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to quell freedom of reason, creativity and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the world's air: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a threat to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
