Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in creature form; where the skies are populated with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but older, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are shown to be deeply connected with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe. Her individual quest to reconnect with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of reason, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. A particular portal manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict logic and revert to instinct, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is in some way essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
