Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are caught and drinks is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
His choice to leave in search of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the church's dominium. A key character, who carried baby the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by some as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger battle with an controlling system which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
The story starts with the finding of a collection of unusual fissures in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. A particular window appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between innocence and experience is set.
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
Elena Hartwell is a multidisciplinary artist and educator passionate about fostering creative communities in London.