🔗 Share this article

Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."

Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

His choice to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's control. A key character, who saved young the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which seems somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe

In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to quell autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The story starts with the discovery of a set of curious openings in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that appear to lead to other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its helm, designates these portals as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible reason and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way vital – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.

Story Tempo and Character Development

At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the