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 tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in creature form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, warier, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh power to expand the church's control. Another protagonist, who carried infant the heroine to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the source of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply connected with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her fate are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her personal mission to reconnect with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: gateways that seem to open into different dimensions. One such window seems to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
