Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her fate are shown to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to stifle independence of thinking, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the unveiling of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the planet's sky: gateways that look to open into other worlds. One such portal manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict reason and return to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between naivety and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
