Things are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but below, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh influence to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The oil is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, her choices and her fate are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader war with an oppressive government which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of thought, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book starts with the finding of a series of unusual cracks in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that look to give on to other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
