Things are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and drinks is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her personal quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger war with an controlling system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the discovery of a series of strange openings in the structure of the world's atmosphere: gateways that seem to give on to alternate realities. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its helm, designates these openings as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible reason and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between purity and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
