Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress independence of thinking, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a collection of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that look to open into alternate realities. A particular opening appears to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these openings as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and return to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
