Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, transports are ridden and beverages is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, 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 her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh influence to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is viewed by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell independence of thought, innovation and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the unveiling of a set of unusual fissures in the makeup of the planet's air: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a threat to the church's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict logic and back to instinct, yet, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
