Tings are collapsing in the last installment 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 intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the church's dominium. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and financial crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable product, by others as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the original series, her choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her personal quest to reconnect with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to suppress autonomy of reason, creativity and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of strange fissures in the structure of the planet's air: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible logic and revert to instinct, however, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical tussle between purity and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
