Things are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and determined main character of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the religion's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from that area. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a marketable good, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to stifle independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. One such portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its head, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible logic and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is somehow vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between purity and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
