Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound authority to broaden the religion's dominium. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to reconnect with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider war with an oppressive government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle independence of reason, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story begins with the discovery of a series of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that appear to lead to alternate realities. A particular window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these portals as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible logic and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
