Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a wider battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to suppress independence of thought, innovation and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the unveiling of a set of curious cracks in the makeup of the planet's air: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. One such portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its head, designates these openings as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
