Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography aligns with 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 paired by daemons, essences in creature form; where the skies are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but below, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's rule. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her personal journey to reconnect with her soul and regain her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the world's air: gateways that seem to open into other worlds. One such window manifests to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, designates these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict rationalism and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between purity and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
