Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are caught and drinks is sipped, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the religion's control. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her destiny are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm. Her personal quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, innovation and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the world's air: windows that look to lead to other worlds. One such window seems to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible logic and return to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic struggle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
