Things are unraveling 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 slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and determined main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the church's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which seems in some way to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply connected with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her fate are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a broader war with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a set of unusual openings in the structure of the world's atmosphere: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to instinct, however, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between innocence and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the