Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the skies are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to expand the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The extract is seen by some as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the world. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the key struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thinking, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a series of curious cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that appear to lead to different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and back to intuition, yet, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
