🔗 Share this article

Things are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."

Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to leave in quest of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to expand the religion's rule. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which seems in some way to be the source of a social and financial crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is regarded by some as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

Like the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the fate of the realm

In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The book begins with the discovery of a collection of curious fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into other worlds. One such window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these openings as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and revert to feeling, yet, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between innocence and experience is prepared.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

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