Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in creature form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to broaden the institution's rule. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, innovation and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the finding of a collection of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's air: windows that appear to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the religion's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical conflict between purity and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
