Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are caught and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled 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 outset, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to extend the institution's control. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about his aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable commodity, by others as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Like the original series, her actions and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to reunite with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the unveiling of a set of unusual openings in the structure of the world's atmosphere: gateways that seem to open into alternate realities. An example of a window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a threat to the church's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
