Tings are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and beverages is drunk, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to extend the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to the city to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable good, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the original series, her choices and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities always have, is striving to suppress independence of thought, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the discovery of a series of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's air: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. A particular opening manifests to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid logic and return to feeling, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
