Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and tea is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound authority to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which seems somehow to be the source of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable product, by different parties as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her path are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her personal journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes always have, is striving to stifle independence of thought, innovation and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's sky: gateways that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such window seems to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid logic and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
