Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in creature form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's rule. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle autonomy of reason, innovation and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story starts with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the structure of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular portal appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean tussle between naivety and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
