Things are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in beast form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and determined heroine of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from that area. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a larger battle with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress independence of thinking, originality and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the finding of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
