Things are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to expand the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about his aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the original series, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply woven with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to reunite with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of reason, creativity and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that appear to give on to alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these windows as a threat to the institution's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible reason and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and their value is in some way essential – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between innocence and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
