Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and tea is drunk, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and determined main character of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to expand the church's control. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the future of the world. Her personal mission to reunite with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the key struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems always have, is striving to suppress independence of thought, innovation and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the finding of a set of curious cracks in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to lead to alternate realities. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the religion's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
