Things 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 manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in beast form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's control. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which appears somehow to be the source of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by some as a marketable good, by others as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably woven with the future of the realm. Her private quest to reunite with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's sky: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. A particular portal appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with its leader at its leadership, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict rationalism and revert to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between naivety and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
