Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the air are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The oil is seen by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these openings as a threat to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
