Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's control. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The substance is regarded by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her soul and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a larger conflict with an oppressive system which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book starts with the discovery of a set of unusual cracks in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that appear to lead to other worlds. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a problem to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
