Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first introduced three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and financial crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by some as a marketable product, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the world. Her personal journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a broader war with an controlling government which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book opens with the unveiling of a series of strange openings in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: portals that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular window seems to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these portals as a threat to the church's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict rationalism and back to feeling, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
