I read HDM some time ago, then last week I read Once Upon a Time in the North, and this brought back to my mind a couple of major doubts I had about HDM ending; from here on there will be some big spoiler.
We know that in the end Will and Lyra can't be togheter, and Philipp said this was the only possible end to the story; the problem is, from the story I see a really easy way around that (my second doubt), a way for Lyra and Will to be together. But, if this way is real, then their separation wasn't inevitable, but simply matter of superficiality (not thinking about a really simple solution).
So here I'm, hoping to find an explanation.
When Lyra and Will spoke with Xaphania, they wonder about the chance to have a window left open for them to meet, but they discard this thinking about the dead:
“And must all the windows be closed?” said Will. “Every single one?”
“[...] there could be one left open.”
Will trembled with excitement, [...] But Lyra was shaking her head.
“No,” she said in a quiet wail, “we can’t, Will—”
And he suddenly knew her thought, and in the same anguished tone, he said, “No, the dead—”
“We must leave it open for them! We must!”
“Yes, otherwise…”
Here my first doubt: as far as I understood, the dead being stuck in that dimension, if without that window, isn't a natural condition, is something made up by the Autority; noone think about this, though. It's impossible to revert what the Autority made?
But the biggest doubt is the second: in addition to leave one artificial window open, there is the possibility to leave a natural one, but Xaphania denied this this way:
“The openings that weren’t made by the subtle knife,” Will said, “is it really necessary to close them all? Because surely Dust only escapes through the openings the knife made. The other ones must have been there for thousands of years, and still Dust exists.”
The angel said, “We shall close them all, because if you thought that any still remained, you would spend your life searching for one, and that would be a waste of the time you have. You have other work than that to do, much more important and valuable, in your own world. There will be no travel outside it anymore.”
And this really baffled me: if the problem is Will'd spend his whole life searching for the window... then simply tell him where it is. If he knows he won't spent his life searching it. But noone thought about this, so a really easy way around was lost (was it?).
Someone has any idea about this?
