Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and tea is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, Lyra's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a larger battle with an oppressive system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle independence of thought, originality and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the discovery of a collection of curious openings in the makeup of the planet's air: gateways that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular window seems to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
