Things are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's choices and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her private mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story opens with the finding of a series of curious fissures in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to open into different dimensions. A particular opening manifests to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these openings as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical tussle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
