Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to extend the church's dominium. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider conflict with an oppressive government which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to suppress autonomy of reason, originality and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the discovery of a series of unusual fissures in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. A particular opening seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict logic and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
