Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a larger battle with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell independence of reason, innovation and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the discovery of a set of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these windows as a threat to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible logic and return to instinct, yet, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
