Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and tea is sipped, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and determined heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to extend the institution's rule. A key character, who carried baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe. Her private journey to reunite with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a broader conflict with an oppressive system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story opens with the discovery of a collection of strange openings in the fabric of the world's air: gateways that appear to give on to alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and return to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
