Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar 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". Control is flowing away from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are taken and drinks is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's rule. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and regain her vision becomes the key struggle in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of reason, innovation and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story opens with the discovery of a collection of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: gateways that seem to open into different dimensions. A particular portal seems to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these portals as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid rationalism and return to instinct, yet, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean tussle between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
