Things are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh influence to broaden the religion's dominium. A key character, who saved baby Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about his aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The oil is regarded by some as a marketable commodity, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the fate of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a wider war with an controlling regime which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to suppress independence of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the unveiling of a series of unusual fissures in the structure of the planet's air: windows that appear to lead to alternate realities. One such window seems to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical struggle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
