Things are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to extend the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about his aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The oil is seen by some as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the original series, her choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thinking, creativity and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the discovery of a series of curious cracks in the fabric of the world's air: portals that appear to lead to different dimensions. An example of a opening manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict reason and return to feeling, however, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
