Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to expand the church's rule. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is seen by various factions as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the original series, her movements and her fate are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world. Her personal journey to reconnect with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an controlling regime which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange cracks in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to open into different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict reason and revert to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
