Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and tea is drunk, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to extend the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The substance is seen by some as a marketable commodity, by others as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the universe. Her personal journey to reunite with her soul and recover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a wider battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress autonomy of reason, creativity and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the structure of the Earth's sky: gateways that look to lead to other worlds. A particular opening seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to instinct, yet, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow vital – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between naivety and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
