Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and determined main character of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to extend the church's control. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to security along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is regarded by various factions as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an oppressive system which, as these systems always have, is striving to suppress autonomy of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book opens with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that seem to lead to different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these portals as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and return to instinct, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
