Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in search of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the church's governing body, and is set on using his newfound authority to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which seems in some way to be the source of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems typically do, is striving to quell freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious fissures in the makeup of the world's air: gateways that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular window seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its helm, labels these portals as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical conflict between naivety and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
