Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but below, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which seems somehow to be the source of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's choices and her fate are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to quell independence of thought, creativity and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the unveiling of a set of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: windows that look to open into other worlds. A particular portal appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and back to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
