Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's control. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which appears in some way to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. As in the original series, her movements and her path are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe. Her private quest to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an oppressive system which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the unveiling of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the planet's air: portals that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and return to feeling, yet, her belief that these places must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between naivety and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
