Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound authority to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by others as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a larger war with an oppressive system which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to suppress freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story begins with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the planet's sky: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such portal appears to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these windows as a threat to the institution's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between purity and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
