Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the church's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to broaden the religion's rule. A key character, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, 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. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her personal journey to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to quell autonomy of reason, originality and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story starts with the unveiling of a collection of unusual openings in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that look to lead to other worlds. One such window seems to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic tussle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
