Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh power to extend the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the original series, her choices and her path are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a wider battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that appear to lead to other worlds. One such window seems to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible logic and revert to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between purity and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the