Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's dominium. A key character, who carried young Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and financial crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her path are unveiled to be deeply woven with the destiny of the universe. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the key conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the discovery of a collection of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's sky: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these openings as a threat to the institution's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to intuition, however, her belief that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously essential – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between purity and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
