Tings are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound authority to broaden the religion's dominium. A key character, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The substance is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger war with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell independence of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: gateways that seem to give on to other worlds. An example of a portal appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a threat to the institution's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic tussle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
