Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his newfound authority to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply connected with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the central conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to suppress freedom of thought, creativity and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the finding of a series of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that look to open into other worlds. A particular window appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, designates these windows as a threat to the church's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict logic and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
