Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in search of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader battle with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to stifle autonomy of thinking, originality and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book opens with the discovery of a collection of unusual fissures in the makeup of the planet's air: gateways that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a portal seems to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a threat to the religion's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their significance and their value is somehow vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, 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 poetic tussle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
