Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and beverages is sipped, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which seems in some way to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is regarded by some as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell autonomy of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's air: gateways that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such opening manifests to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between purity and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
