Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the church's High Council, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by others as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her fate are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary conflict in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book starts with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to open into other worlds. One such opening appears to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, designates these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic struggle between purity and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
