Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are ridden and tea is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to extend the religion's control. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from that area. The extract is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her destiny are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a broader battle with an controlling system which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to stifle autonomy of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the finding of a set of curious cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and back to feeling, however, her belief that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
