Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from that area. The extract is viewed by some as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply connected with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a wider war with an oppressive government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to quell autonomy of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the discovery of a set of strange openings in the structure of the world's air: windows that seem to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict reason and back to instinct, however, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way crucial – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
