Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in search of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to extend the institution's dominium. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to a key location to discover more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a wider conflict with an oppressive regime which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a series of unusual cracks in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. One such opening appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict logic and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
