Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old 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 The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and determined heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who saved young the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable commodity, by others as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and regain her vision becomes the central struggle in a larger conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the discovery of a collection of unusual openings in the fabric of the Earth's sky: gateways that appear to give on to alternate realities. A particular window seems to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously vital – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
