Things are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the skies are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, vehicles are caught and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to expand the church's control. A key character, who saved young Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to suppress independence of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the discovery of a collection of unusual openings in the structure of the world's atmosphere: gateways that seem to give on to alternate realities. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the church's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict reason and return to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is in some way vital – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic tussle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
