Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound influence to broaden the church's control. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which seems in some way to be the source of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to stifle autonomy of reason, innovation and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the discovery of a collection of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. A particular portal appears to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and revert to feeling, however, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
