Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and determined heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a tradeable commodity, by others as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider battle with an oppressive regime which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thought, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the finding of a collection of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that look to lead to other worlds. A particular window manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the religion's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
