Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in search of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to extend the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from that area. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her path are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a broader battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to quell independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the unveiling of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: gateways that appear to lead to different dimensions. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between purity and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
