Tings are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in search of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the institution's control. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Like the original series, Lyra's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the universe. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, creativity and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the unveiling of a series of unusual cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible logic and back to feeling, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
