🔗 Share this article

Tings are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, 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 strong are deteriorating and failing."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives this final volume, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from the region. The substance is viewed by some as a commercial product, by different parties as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.

Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm

In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world. Her private quest to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an oppressive government which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to stifle independence of thinking, originality and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The novel opens with the finding of a collection of unusual cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. One such opening manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between innocence and maturity is established.

Narrative Pacing and Character Development

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the