Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in quest of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial crisis spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by some as a marketable good, by others as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her path are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to reunite with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger war with an oppressive government which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to stifle independence of thought, innovation and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the unveiling of a set of curious fissures in the fabric of the planet's air: gateways that seem to open into different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid reason and revert to instinct, yet, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their significance and their value is mysteriously essential – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
