Things are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound power to broaden the church's control. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her fate are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe. Her individual journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a broader battle with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to stifle independence of thinking, originality and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the discovery of a set of strange openings in the structure of the world's sky: portals that appear to lead to alternate realities. A particular window manifests to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic tussle between naivety and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
