Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, 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 depart in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to find out more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Like the original series, her movements and her fate are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress autonomy of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the finding of a series of unusual openings in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. A particular window appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic struggle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
