Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to the city to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her path are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, creativity and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the finding of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the planet's sky: windows that look to give on to different dimensions. A particular window manifests to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these windows as a threat to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict reason and return to feeling, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
