Things are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and beverages is sipped, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel 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 aged, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound influence to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The oil is seen by certain groups as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the original series, Lyra's actions and her fate are shown to be deeply woven with the fate of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the central conflict in a wider war with an oppressive system which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's air: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and back to intuition, yet, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
