Things are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about his aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by others as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell freedom of thought, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the discovery of a set of curious fissures in the makeup of the planet's air: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. A particular window manifests to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between purity and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
