Things are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in search of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the church's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to expand the church's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, her choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider war with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thinking, creativity and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the discovery of a series of strange openings in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its head, classifies these portals as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
