Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his fresh power to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, 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 puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by some as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the original series, her choices and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her personal journey to rejoin with her soul and regain her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell freedom of reason, innovation and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious fissures in the makeup of the world's air: gateways that seem to give on to different dimensions. A particular portal appears to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and back to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
