Things are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are taken and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound power to broaden the religion's control. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from the region. The oil is seen by some as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the central conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress freedom of thought, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the unveiling of a series of unusual cracks in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: gateways that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these portals as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
