Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are ridden and tea is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the church's control. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her path are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the key conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes always have, is striving to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious openings in the structure of the planet's sky: windows that look to give on to different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, designates these openings as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict reason and back to intuition, yet, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and their value is in some way vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
