Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and determined main character of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by various factions as a commercial commodity, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a broader conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the unveiling of a series of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these openings as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
