Things are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world. Her personal mission to reconnect with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a wider battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to quell independence of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the planet's air: portals that look to open into alternate realities. A particular window appears to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
