Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to the city to find out more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The extract is seen by some as a marketable good, by others as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the discovery of a series of curious cracks in the fabric of the Earth's sky: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. One such portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the institution's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible reason and return to feeling, however, her belief that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between innocence and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
