Tings are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the world. Her individual quest to reconnect with her soul and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the discovery of a collection of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that look to lead to different dimensions. One such window appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict reason and revert to feeling, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is in some way vital – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between naivety and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
