Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her destiny are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the realm. Her private quest to rejoin with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the key struggle in a broader conflict with an oppressive government which, as such authorities always have, is striving to suppress independence of thinking, originality and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book begins with the discovery of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the world's sky: portals that appear to give on to alternate realities. A particular window appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict reason and return to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical conflict between purity and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
