Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are taken and drinks is consumed, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to security along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which appears in some way to be the source of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The substance is seen by some as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her path are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's air: windows that look to give on to alternate realities. A particular opening appears to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, labels these windows as a threat to the religion's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean conflict between naivety and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
