Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the skies are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are caught and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more 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 prickly and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to security along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the fabric of the world's sky: portals that seem to give on to other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these windows as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict rationalism and return to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between naivety and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
