Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, warier, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's control. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her fate are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her personal quest to reunite with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to quell freedom of thinking, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the discovery of a collection of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's sky: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. One such opening manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these openings as a threat to the religion's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict reason and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
