Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, warier, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the original series, her actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress freedom of reason, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book begins with the unveiling of a collection of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
