Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and determined main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the central conflict in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to quell freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the unveiling of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to different dimensions. One such portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a challenge to the church's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict logic and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
