Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and beverages is consumed, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in search of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's dominium. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her path are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her individual journey to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell freedom of thought, originality and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story starts with the finding of a collection of curious openings in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: windows that look to lead to other worlds. One such portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her belief that these places must be defended – that their significance and their value is in some way vital – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
