Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and persistent main character of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in search of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the religion's dominium. A key character, who saved young Lyra to security along a swollen river as an child 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 Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the original series, Lyra's actions and her destiny are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to reconnect with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a broader war with an controlling regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to quell freedom of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the unveiling of a series of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to other worlds. One such window seems to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid reason and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
