Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing 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 religious ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The extract is seen by some as a tradeable good, by others as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are shown to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her individual journey to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress freedom of thinking, creativity and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the structure of the planet's air: windows that appear to open into alternate realities. A particular window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
