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 intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and tea is consumed, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a marketable product, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to suppress freedom of reason, innovation and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: gateways that seem to give on to other worlds. One such window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, however, her belief that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic conflict between innocence and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
