Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in search of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound power to expand the institution's rule. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from that area. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as these systems always have, is striving to stifle autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the discovery of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the planet's air: portals that look to lead to other worlds. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is in some way vital – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
