Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and determined main character of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound authority to expand the church's rule. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The oil is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the original series, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the future of the world. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of thought, creativity and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: gateways that appear to open into different dimensions. One such opening manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
