Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by others as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the original series, the protagonist's actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her personal quest to reconnect with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is striving to quell freedom of reason, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story begins with the unveiling of a set of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that seem to open into other worlds. A particular window seems to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, labels these windows as a threat to the church's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to instinct, however, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
