Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's control. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to security along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is seen by some as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the original series, her choices and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell freedom of reason, innovation and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the finding of a series of strange openings in the structure of the world's sky: portals that look to lead to different dimensions. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict reason and revert to feeling, yet, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
