Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but below, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to extend the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to find out more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by various factions as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the central struggle in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle independence of thinking, creativity and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the finding of a collection of curious fissures in the structure of the world's sky: portals that appear to open into different dimensions. One such opening seems to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, designates these portals as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way crucial – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between purity and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
