Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are taken and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the church's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to security along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to learn more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the original series, her choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the finding of a series of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's air: portals that seem to lead to other worlds. One such opening manifests to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, designates these openings as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and revert to intuition, yet, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between purity and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
