Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the skies are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's control. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to reunite with her soul and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling government which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, innovation and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the world's air: windows that seem to open into other worlds. One such portal seems to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict logic and return to intuition, however, her belief that these places must be protected – that their meaning and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
