Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, transports are taken and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and persistent main character of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the church's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to extend the church's rule. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to find out more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a tradeable product, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, the protagonist's actions and her path are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to quell freedom of thought, innovation and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the finding of a set of unusual fissures in the structure of the planet's air: portals that seem to give on to other worlds. One such portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, yet, her belief that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between innocence and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
