Things are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in beast form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are taken and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's dominium. A key character, who carried young the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her destiny are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress freedom of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book opens with the unveiling of a series of unusual openings in the makeup of the world's sky: gateways that appear to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the church's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
