Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain 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 animal souls, beings in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and tea is drunk, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's dominium. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the original series, Lyra's choices and her fate are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and regain her vision becomes the primary conflict in a larger war with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to stifle independence of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the unveiling of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. One such window manifests to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and return to feeling, however, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
