Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the institution's dominium. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by various factions as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, her choices and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider war with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell autonomy of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's sky: windows that seem to lead to different dimensions. An example of a portal appears to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict reason and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic tussle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
