Things are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the church's control. A key character, who saved young the heroine to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is regarded by some as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, designates these openings as a problem to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and back to instinct, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
