Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are caught and tea is sipped, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh power to extend the institution's control. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the original series, her movements and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is striving to stifle autonomy of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the finding of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such opening seems to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible logic and back to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously essential – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
