Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound authority to expand the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about his plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is regarded by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by others as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her personal journey to rejoin with her companion and regain her vision becomes the key struggle in a wider conflict with an authoritarian government which, as these systems always have, is striving to quell autonomy of reason, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to give on to alternate realities. An example of a window appears to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these openings as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict rationalism and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
