Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to extend the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which seems in some way to be the source of a social and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in the original series, her choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe. Her private mission to reconnect with her companion and regain her vision becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that look to lead to alternate realities. A particular window appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its head, classifies these portals as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between naivety and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
