Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, transports are caught and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial crisis spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her fate are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a larger battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, innovation and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of curious fissures in the fabric of the planet's air: windows that seem to lead to alternate realities. One such opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible reason and revert to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow crucial – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
