Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in animal form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the church's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The substance is seen by some as a commercial commodity, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a broader battle with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, innovation and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the discovery of a set of curious openings in the structure of the planet's sky: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. One such window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with its leader at its leadership, designates these windows as a threat to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between innocence and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
