Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are caught and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more careful, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh authority to extend the institution's dominium. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her path are revealed to be inseparably woven with the future of the universe. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the structure of the world's air: portals that look to lead to other worlds. A particular portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these portals as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
