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 seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and beverages is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the church's rule. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to the city to learn more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to suppress independence of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story begins with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's air: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a threat to the church's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict reason and return to instinct, yet, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean tussle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
