Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the skies are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are caught and beverages is sipped, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent main character of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to extend the religion's control. A key character, who saved baby Lyra to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her path are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a broader war with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of thought, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that appear to open into alternate realities. An example of a window seems to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these portals as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from strict rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
