Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, transports are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in search of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his fresh power to expand the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The substance is viewed by some as a marketable good, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world. Her personal journey to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of thinking, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the finding of a collection of unusual openings in the structure of the world's air: portals that look to lead to other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these openings as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict rationalism and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean conflict between naivety and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
