Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the skies are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but below, transports are caught and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a wider battle with an oppressive regime which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to quell autonomy of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book starts with the discovery of a set of curious openings in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. A particular opening seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and return to feeling, however, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously vital – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between innocence and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
