Things are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's last foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and beverages is sipped, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound authority to expand the religion's rule. A key character, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm. Her private journey to reunite with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell independence of thought, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book begins with the discovery of a series of curious cracks in the structure of the world's sky: windows that appear to open into alternate realities. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, designates these portals as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
