Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the church's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the institution's control. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the original series, her movements and her path are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a wider battle with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the discovery of a set of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's air: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict rationalism and back to instinct, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
