Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the skies are populated with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury 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 introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the institution's control. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her private journey to reunite with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the key conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell independence of reason, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story starts with the unveiling of a set of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's sky: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal appears to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
