Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in search of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's control. A key character, who carried baby the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by some as a commercial product, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the key battleground in a broader conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to quell freedom of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that look to lead to alternate realities. A particular portal seems to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these openings as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, however, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow vital – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between innocence and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
