Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's dominium. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to the city to learn more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from that area. The extract is regarded by some as a marketable good, by others as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to stifle independence of thinking, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a series of curious cracks in the makeup of the planet's air: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a challenge to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
