Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the institution's rule. A key character, who carried baby the heroine to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable good, by others as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the universe. Her personal journey to reconnect with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: gateways that look to lead to alternate realities. A particular opening seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict rationalism and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between purity and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
