Things are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound influence to expand the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm. Her private mission to reunite with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the key conflict in a larger war with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to suppress autonomy of reason, originality and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that look to open into alternate realities. A particular opening seems to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its helm, classifies these openings as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between purity and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
