Things are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound authority to expand the religion's rule. A key character, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by some as a tradeable commodity, by others as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's movements and her fate are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her private mission to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a wider war with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the discovery of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and back to intuition, however, her belief that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
