Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in search of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to expand the institution's control. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to a key location to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from that area. The extract is regarded by some as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to reunite with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a broader conflict with an oppressive system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to suppress independence of thinking, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. A particular window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic conflict between purity and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
