Things are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to expand the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the key battleground in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a series of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. A particular opening appears to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these openings as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
