🔗 Share this article

Tings are collapsing in the concluding book 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 skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, buses are taken and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to extend the religion's rule. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The oil is seen by various factions as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe

In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her path are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to suppress independence of thought, creativity and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The story starts with the unveiling of a set of unusual fissures in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: portals that look to give on to different dimensions. A particular opening manifests to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, labels these portals as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and maturity is set.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the