Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the air are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary conflict in a broader battle with an controlling government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell independence of reason, innovation and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book opens with the discovery of a collection of unusual cracks in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, classifies these portals as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict rationalism and return to instinct, however, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical struggle between purity and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
