Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and tea is drunk, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story begins with the discovery of a set of curious openings in the fabric of the world's air: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict reason and return to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is in some way essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
