Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh power to expand the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The substance is seen by various factions as a commercial product, by different parties as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader battle with an controlling government which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to stifle independence of thinking, creativity and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the finding of a series of unusual openings in the makeup of the world's air: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window manifests to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean conflict between innocence and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
