Things are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and drinks is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined main character of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh power to extend the religion's dominium. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the original series, Lyra's movements and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a wider war with an oppressive government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the finding of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the world's air: portals that look to give on to alternate realities. An example of a window appears to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these windows as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
