Tings are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is sipped, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell independence of thought, originality and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book starts with the finding of a collection of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: portals that seem to lead to other worlds. One such window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, yet, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between purity and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
