Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The extract is viewed by some as a commercial good, by others as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an controlling regime which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the unveiling of a series of unusual cracks in the structure of the planet's air: windows that look to give on to different dimensions. A particular window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict reason and back to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
