Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant 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 deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are shown to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book begins with the unveiling of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that appear to lead to other worlds. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its head, classifies these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible logic and revert to feeling, yet, her belief that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
