Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, transports are caught 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 first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound authority to expand the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by some as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe. Her private quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central conflict in a wider war with an controlling government which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to quell independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the discovery of a series of curious openings in the structure of the planet's air: windows that seem to give on to other worlds. A particular portal seems to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
