Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in beast form; where the air are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are caught and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound influence to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by others as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to quell independence of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that look to open into alternate realities. A particular opening seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
