Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, warier, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the church's dominium. A key character, who carried baby the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply connected with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the world. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of thought, originality and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story opens with the unveiling of a set of unusual cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that appear to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening seems to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict logic and back to feeling, however, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
