Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and determined main character of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh power to extend the institution's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the original series, her actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the realm. Her personal quest to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to stifle independence of thought, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the finding of a series of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. A particular window manifests to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a problem to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
