Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in quest of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's rule. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by some as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the original series, Lyra's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world. Her private mission to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a broader battle with an oppressive regime which, as these systems typically do, is striving to quell freedom of thinking, originality and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the discovery of a set of curious cracks in the structure of the world's air: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such opening manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible reason and back to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
