Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are ridden and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to extend the church's rule. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply connected with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the original series, her actions and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to reunite with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the key battleground in a wider battle with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to stifle independence of reason, creativity and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the finding of a series of strange openings in the fabric of the world's sky: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. A particular window manifests to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its helm, classifies these openings as a challenge to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid logic and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously vital – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between naivety and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
