Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are caught and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems somehow to be the source of a social and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her personal mission to reconnect with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the key conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is striving to suppress independence of thought, originality and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious fissures in the makeup of the world's air: portals that appear to lead to different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these portals as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid rationalism and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
