Things are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in search of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to a key location to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by some as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her path are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe. Her individual quest to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the central struggle in a broader war with an oppressive system which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to stifle independence of reason, creativity and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a series of curious openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict reason and return to instinct, however, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
