Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are caught and drinks is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the key conflict in a broader war with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the finding of a collection of unusual fissures in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow vital – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
