Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, transports are ridden and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from the region. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the central battleground in a wider battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell freedom of thinking, innovation and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the unveiling of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the world's air: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these openings as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and return to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
