Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the skies are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and drinks is sipped, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to security along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by various factions as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her path are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her personal journey to rejoin with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to stifle independence of reason, innovation and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that look to open into alternate realities. One such window manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible logic and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between innocence and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
