Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates this final volume, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the original series, her choices and her fate are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her private journey to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling government which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the world's sky: gateways that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these portals as a threat to the church's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean conflict between naivety and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
