Things are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, transports are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and financial crisis spreading out from the region. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a commercial good, by others as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the original series, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book begins with the finding of a collection of curious fissures in the structure of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal seems to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and return to feeling, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between naivety and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
