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 manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and drinks is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
His choice to depart in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by others as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, innovation and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
The story starts with the unveiling of a series of curious openings in the fabric of the planet's sky: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid reason and return to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic struggle between innocence and experience is set.
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
Elara Vance is a dedicated MapleStory enthusiast and gaming writer, known for creating in-depth guides and staying updated on game mechanics.
