Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to expand the church's control. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her private mission to reunite with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider battle with an controlling system which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to suppress autonomy of thinking, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: portals that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible logic and return to instinct, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between purity and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
