Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are taken and beverages is drunk, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to expand the church's rule. A key character, who saved young the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities always have, is striving to stifle autonomy of reason, creativity and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a collection of unusual cracks in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. One such portal manifests to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
