Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape 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 accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound influence to broaden the church's dominium. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by certain groups as a tradeable product, by different parties as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the central conflict in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the discovery of a set of curious openings in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its helm, labels these openings as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between purity and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
