Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next 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 restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are ridden and drinks is consumed, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh power to extend the institution's rule. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her path are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of thought, creativity and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the unveiling of a series of unusual fissures in the structure of the world's atmosphere: portals that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid reason and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean struggle between naivety and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
