Tings are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the skies are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, transports are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's control. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's choices and her path are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe. Her personal quest to reunite with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a wider battle with an authoritarian government which, as these systems always have, is striving to suppress independence of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story begins with the finding of a set of curious openings in the fabric of the planet's sky: windows that look to open into other worlds. A particular opening manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict rationalism and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is in some way vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
