Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are caught and tea is consumed, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in quest of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the church's rule. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which appears somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her path are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her individual journey to reunite with her soul and regain her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems always have, is striving to suppress autonomy of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the discovery of a collection of unusual fissures in the makeup of the planet's air: portals that appear to open into other worlds. One such portal appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid rationalism and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between innocence and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
