Tings are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the church's control. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they converge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her path are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the world's air: portals that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular portal seems to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its helm, classifies these portals as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to feeling, however, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean struggle between purity and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
