Things are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and drinks is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in search of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from that area. The substance is regarded by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the finding of a set of curious fissures in the fabric of the world's air: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and revert to feeling, yet, her belief that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
