Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, transports are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the institution's control. Another protagonist, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The substance is regarded by some as a marketable product, by others as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger battle with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book starts with the finding of a collection of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's sky: windows that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to intuition, yet, her belief that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
