Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to extend the church's control. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The extract is seen by some as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, her choices and her path are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a wider battle with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to suppress independence of thought, creativity and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the finding of a set of unusual fissures in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical struggle between naivety and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
