Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in quest of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to the city to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a larger war with an controlling government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell independence of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the finding of a set of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and return to feeling, yet, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and their value is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
