Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh influence to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by others as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to suppress freedom of reason, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
