Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined heroine of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh power to extend the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to learn more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The oil is regarded by various factions as a tradeable product, by others as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story begins with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular portal seems to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
