Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh power to extend the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to a key location to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by some as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably connected with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the original series, her movements and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to stifle independence of thought, originality and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the unveiling of a set of unusual openings in the structure of the Earth's air: portals that appear to give on to alternate realities. A particular opening seems to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these portals as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
