Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's rule. A key character, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inextricably connected with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her fate are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual quest to reunite with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress independence of thinking, innovation and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the unveiling of a set of unusual openings in the fabric of the world's air: windows that seem to open into other worlds. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its helm, classifies these openings as a threat to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and return to intuition, yet, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between purity and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
