Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are caught and tea is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the church's dominium. A key character, who carried young the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Like the original series, her movements and her destiny are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to suppress independence of thought, creativity and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the unveiling of a set of curious openings in the makeup of the planet's air: portals that look to lead to different dimensions. A particular opening appears to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her belief that these places must be protected – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
