Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are caught and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined main character of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to security along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The oil is seen by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her fate are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to reconnect with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the key conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of thought, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the finding of a collection of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that appear to lead to other worlds. A particular portal seems to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these openings as a challenge to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible logic and return to feeling, however, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
