Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, buses are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in search of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her path are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the world. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a wider battle with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to quell freedom of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: gateways that seem to give on to alternate realities. An example of a portal appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with its leader at its leadership, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and back to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between naivety and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
