Things are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are ridden and tea is sipped, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable product, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, Lyra's movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual mission to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider war with an controlling government which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to stifle independence of reason, innovation and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the unveiling of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the world's sky: gateways that look to open into other worlds. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, labels these windows as a threat to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible reason and revert to feeling, yet, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously vital – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
