Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the religion's control. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's movements and her fate are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell independence of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the discovery of a set of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. One such portal seems to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid rationalism and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
