Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and drinks is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the church's control. A key character, who saved young the heroine to security along a swollen river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to the city to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which appears somehow to be the source of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from the region. The oil is seen by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be deeply connected with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a larger war with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the discovery of a collection of curious openings in the structure of the planet's air: gateways that look to lead to other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and back to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic tussle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
