Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in quest of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell independence of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story begins with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
