Things are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the skies are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are taken and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about his plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a larger conflict with an oppressive system which, as such authorities always have, is striving to quell autonomy of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: portals that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these openings as a problem to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously vital – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
