Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old 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 adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more careful, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in search of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound authority to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the realm. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story opens with the discovery of a collection of strange openings in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: portals that look to lead to different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these portals as a problem to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict reason and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic struggle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
