Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the religion's control. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her choices and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, innovation and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the discovery of a set of strange openings in the structure of the world's air: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. An example of a opening appears to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and return to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
