Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and determined heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh influence to broaden the religion's control. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The extract is seen by some as a tradeable product, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply connected with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an oppressive government which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to quell autonomy of thought, creativity and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story begins with the finding of a collection of curious fissures in the structure of the world's sky: gateways that seem to open into different dimensions. One such window appears to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between purity and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
