Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her soul and recover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is striving to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the finding of a set of unusual cracks in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that seem to lead to alternate realities. One such opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously vital – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
