Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in beast form; where the air are populated with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, 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.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound power to expand the church's control. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable product, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her fate are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger battle with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to suppress autonomy of reason, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story starts with the finding of a collection of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's sky: gateways that appear to lead to different dimensions. One such opening manifests to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a threat to the church's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and back to instinct, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic tussle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
