Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial 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 disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by some as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her destiny are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the world. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to stifle freedom of thinking, creativity and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a set of curious openings in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. A particular portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these portals as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between purity and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
