Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, transports are taken and tea is consumed, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in the original series, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply woven with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to reunite with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader battle with an controlling system which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, innovation and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book begins with the discovery of a set of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such window appears to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its helm, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between naivety and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
