Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's control. Another protagonist, who rescued young Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is seen by certain groups as a tradeable good, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, Lyra's actions and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to reunite with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the finding of a series of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible reason and return to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
