Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to broaden the church's control. A key character, who saved young the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her private quest to reunite with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story begins with the unveiling of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that appear to open into other worlds. A particular window appears to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, labels these portals as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
