Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his newfound authority to expand the religion's control. A key character, who carried young Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a social and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a broader battle with an oppressive system which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thinking, innovation and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's sky: windows that look to lead to other worlds. One such window manifests to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from strict reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is in some way essential – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
