Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling 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 flowing away from states, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but below, transports are ridden and beverages is consumed, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to extend the institution's control. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her path are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her personal mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an controlling government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story opens with the discovery of a series of curious cracks in the makeup of the world's sky: gateways that look to open into other worlds. One such opening appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these openings as a problem to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and return to intuition, however, her belief that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is in some way vital – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between innocence and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
