Things are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal journey to reunite with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the unveiling of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: portals that look to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible logic and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between purity and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
