🔗 Share this article

Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and giving way."

Key Puzzle and Her Quest

Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

Pan's decision to leave in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound influence to expand the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.

As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm

In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in the original series, her choices and her fate are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her individual journey to reconnect with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the key battleground in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell freedom of reason, innovation and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The book begins with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the structure of the Earth's air: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such opening seems to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the institution's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously vital – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and knowledge is set.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the