Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but below, transports are taken and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, warier, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to extend the church's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by various factions as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world. Her personal journey to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an controlling government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thinking, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a collection of curious fissures in the fabric of the Earth's sky: gateways that look to lead to different dimensions. One such opening seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these openings as a problem to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid rationalism and return to intuition, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
