Tings are falling apart 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 intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound authority to broaden the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby the heroine to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from that area. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable good, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her path are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to suppress freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book opens with the finding of a set of unusual openings in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. A particular opening seems to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical conflict between naivety and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
