Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to the city to learn more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems in some way to be the source of a social and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The extract is seen by some as a commercial good, by different parties as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the original series, Lyra's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to quell independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the discovery of a collection of unusual openings in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that look to lead to different dimensions. A particular window manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, designates these openings as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict rationalism and back to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical struggle between innocence and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
