Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in search of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to extend the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and financial crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply connected with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world. Her personal mission to rejoin with her companion and regain her vision becomes the central battleground in a wider war with an oppressive system which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell independence of thinking, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the finding of a series of strange openings in the structure of the world's air: portals that look to give on to different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its helm, designates these portals as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between naivety and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
