Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's rule. A key character, who saved young the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her personal journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a wider battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the discovery of a series of curious fissures in the structure of the planet's sky: windows that appear to open into other worlds. One such opening seems to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a threat to the church's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and return to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
