Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are taken and beverages is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to extend the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to find out more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by some as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the world. Her private mission to reunite with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a larger war with an oppressive system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the planet's air: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a window appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
