Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful 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 new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the skies are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again 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 recognisably the sharp and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more careful, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby the heroine to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her path are unveiled to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a wider conflict with an controlling government which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to suppress freedom of thought, innovation and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book starts with the discovery of a collection of curious cracks in the structure of the Earth's air: portals that look to lead to other worlds. A particular portal appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way crucial – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
