Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is consumed, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound power to extend the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from the region. The oil is regarded by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
