Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are caught and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and determined main character of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in search of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a social and financial crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her private quest to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling government which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to quell freedom of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book starts with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the world's atmosphere: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. An example of a portal manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
