Things are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in search of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound influence to expand the church's control. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply connected with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the key struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the discovery of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to open into other worlds. One such portal appears to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these portals as a threat to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible logic and back to intuition, however, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean conflict between purity and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
