Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the skies are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are taken and tea is drunk, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh power to extend the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The extract is regarded by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the original series, Lyra's actions and her path are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world. Her private mission to reconnect with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the central conflict in a wider war with an oppressive government which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to stifle autonomy of reason, innovation and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the finding of a series of unusual fissures in the fabric of the planet's air: portals that appear to lead to alternate realities. One such window appears to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and back to instinct, yet, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
