Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in search of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to broaden the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about his aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her personal mission to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a broader battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to suppress independence of thinking, originality and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story starts with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. One such window seems to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a threat to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean conflict between purity and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
