Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Like the original series, Lyra's choices and her destiny are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal mission to rejoin with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the central conflict in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress independence of reason, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the unveiling of a collection of unusual fissures in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that look to give on to other worlds. One such window seems to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid reason and back to feeling, however, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between purity and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
