Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's control. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from that area. The oil is regarded by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, her actions and her path are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary conflict in a wider battle with an oppressive system which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell independence of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's sky: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
