Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the skies are populated with witches and gryphons, but below, transports are taken and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – 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 pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound power to expand the church's dominium. A key character, who saved baby Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her personal mission to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that look to lead to different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, labels these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic struggle between purity and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
