Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a trader character, 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
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are caught and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a tradeable good, by others as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her private journey to reunite with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider conflict with an oppressive regime which, as these systems always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of reason, creativity and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the unveiling of a set of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's air: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. One such window seems to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
