Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are taken and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by some as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress freedom of thinking, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the unveiling of a collection of unusual cracks in the fabric of the world's air: windows that appear to open into alternate realities. A particular portal appears to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict rationalism and return to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic tussle between innocence and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
