Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds 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 accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and drinks is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the cause of a social and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is regarded by some as a marketable product, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the original series, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the world. Her personal journey to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a broader battle with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the finding of a series of curious openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: portals that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and return to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
