Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but below, transports are caught and tea is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Like the original series, Lyra's movements and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the destiny of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the discovery of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that look to give on to other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these openings as a problem to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid logic and back to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and their value is in some way vital – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between purity and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
