Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are taken and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable good, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's movements and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress independence of thought, innovation and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the unveiling of a series of unusual openings in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: gateways that look to lead to alternate realities. One such opening manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict logic and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously vital – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
