Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the church's control. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be deeply connected with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they merge. As in the original series, Lyra's movements and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to reconnect with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a broader war with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to quell independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: portals that seem to give on to other worlds. A particular window seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
