Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to extend the religion's control. Another protagonist, who carried young Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a broader conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
