Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's choices and her fate are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger battle with an oppressive system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thinking, creativity and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book opens with the discovery of a set of unusual fissures in the makeup of the planet's air: windows that look to give on to other worlds. One such window appears to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these windows as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict logic and revert to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
