Tings are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are taken and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is heightened 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
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to learn more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable product, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her fate are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader battle with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell independence of reason, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's sky: windows that seem to open into other worlds. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these openings as a problem to the church's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and back to feeling, however, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow crucial – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic struggle between naivety and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
