Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "An element 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 city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, transports are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems in some way to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a broader battle with an controlling government which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a collection of unusual fissures in the makeup of the planet's sky: portals that look to open into alternate realities. One such opening seems to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and back to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between naivety and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
