Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in search of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her path are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to reconnect with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a broader conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story starts with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a window appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible logic and back to instinct, however, her belief that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is in some way vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
