Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell independence of reason, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the finding of a collection of curious cracks in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that look to give on to different dimensions. A particular window manifests to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean tussle between naivety and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
