Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the skies are populated with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's rule. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her fate are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a broader conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of thinking, originality and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the discovery of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the planet's sky: windows that appear to give on to other worlds. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to instinct, however, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is somehow vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
