Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and determined heroine of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, warier, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the religion's control. Another protagonist, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from that area. The extract is seen by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are unveiled to be deeply woven with the destiny of the realm. Her personal quest to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is striving to suppress independence of thought, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the finding of a collection of curious fissures in the fabric of the world's sky: windows that appear to open into other worlds. One such window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
