Things are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – 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 protected is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an controlling regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to stifle independence of reason, innovation and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the discovery of a series of curious cracks in the fabric of the world's sky: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and return to instinct, yet, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
