Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to expand the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her path are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to reconnect with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a broader battle with an oppressive system which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to quell autonomy of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the finding of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to different dimensions. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its helm, classifies these portals as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict logic and revert to intuition, yet, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
