Things are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to security along a swollen Thames 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 his plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The extract is regarded by some as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her fate are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world. Her personal journey to reconnect with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider conflict with an oppressive government which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell autonomy of reason, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the fabric of the world's sky: windows that appear to lead to other worlds. A particular window seems to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, yet, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
