Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by others as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her path are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an oppressive government which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to suppress independence of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book starts with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such window appears to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its leadership, labels these windows as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to feeling, yet, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "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 Blakean struggle between purity and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
