Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and beverages is consumed, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a larger war with an controlling regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to stifle independence of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's air: windows that appear to open into other worlds. One such portal appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these portals as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid logic and return to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way essential – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
