Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are taken and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, warier, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to extend the church's control. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which appears in some way to be the source of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book opens with the unveiling of a set of strange openings in the structure of the world's atmosphere: windows that appear to lead to other worlds. An example of a portal manifests to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a threat to the church's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and return to feeling, yet, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow vital – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic conflict between innocence and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
