Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and beverages is consumed, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original 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 distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the church's High Council, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to security along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is seen by some as a tradeable product, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her personal quest to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to stifle autonomy of reason, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the finding of a series of unusual openings in the structure of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a window appears to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its helm, labels these openings as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible logic and revert to instinct, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and their value is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
