Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the skies are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her private journey to reunite with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the key conflict in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell freedom of thinking, innovation and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book begins with the unveiling of a series of curious openings in the structure of the world's atmosphere: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. One such window appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these openings as a challenge to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and back to feeling, yet, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic tussle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
