Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more careful, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound authority to expand the church's control. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The substance is regarded by various factions as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her personal journey to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a larger battle with an controlling system which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the fabric of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such portal appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a threat to the institution's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
