Things are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are caught and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's rule. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to a key location to find out more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the future of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to stifle independence of thinking, originality and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that seem to give on to other worlds. An example of a portal manifests to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict reason and return to intuition, however, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously vital – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic tussle between innocence and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
