Things are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, transports are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to extend the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about his plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by some as a marketable product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her personal quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a broader battle with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book opens with the finding of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that appear to open into alternate realities. A particular portal seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and return to feeling, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is somehow essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
