Tings are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are taken and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems in some way to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The extract is viewed by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger battle with an oppressive government which, as these systems always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the discovery of a set of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that look to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal appears to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these portals as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
