Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman 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 faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in beast form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, warier, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the institution's control. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the key conflict in a wider conflict with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thinking, innovation and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the discovery of a collection of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that look to open into different dimensions. One such portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its head, designates these openings as a problem to the religion's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical struggle between purity and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
