Tings are collapsing in the concluding book 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 charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the religion's control. A key character, who carried young Lyra to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable commodity, by others as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her personal quest to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the key struggle in a wider conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the finding of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the planet's sky: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these openings as a challenge to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and back to intuition, however, her belief that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
