Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – 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 – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The oil is seen by some as a marketable commodity, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her path are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private quest to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to stifle autonomy of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's air: gateways that look to lead to other worlds. A particular opening seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously vital – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
