Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and determined main character of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a marketable product, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her individual quest to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story begins with the finding of a series of unusual fissures in the fabric of the planet's sky: windows that appear to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible logic and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
