Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the original series, her choices and her path are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling government which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these windows as a problem to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict reason and return to intuition, however, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic tussle between purity and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
