Things are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The extract is seen by some as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply connected with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in the original series, Lyra's movements and her fate are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities always have, is striving to quell independence of thought, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the finding of a series of curious fissures in the structure of the world's sky: windows that look to open into alternate realities. One such opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a threat to the church's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict reason and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between naivety and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
