Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
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 left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The substance is seen by some as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her private mission to reconnect with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to quell independence of thinking, innovation and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book begins with the unveiling of a set of unusual openings in the structure of the world's sky: windows that appear to give on to alternate realities. A particular opening seems to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict rationalism and revert to feeling, yet, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between naivety and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
