Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the skies are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are taken and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued baby Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the future of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her soul and regain her vision becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to suppress independence of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the unveiling of a collection of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's air: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. A particular window manifests to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, classifies these portals as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
