Things are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh influence to broaden the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a wider conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress independence of thinking, innovation and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book starts with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's sky: gateways that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such window appears to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these portals as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical conflict between purity and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
