Tings are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to find out more about his aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is seen by certain groups as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to reunite with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to stifle independence of thinking, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the unveiling of a set of strange openings in the fabric of the world's sky: portals that appear to give on to alternate realities. A particular portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is somehow vital – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
