Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the skies are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh influence to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to security along a swollen river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The oil is seen by some as a tradeable good, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Like the original series, Lyra's choices and her path are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her private mission to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story begins with the discovery of a collection of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. A particular opening manifests to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
