Things are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are ridden and tea is sipped, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the church's control. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her personal journey to reconnect with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the key battleground in a larger war with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is seeking to quell independence of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into other worlds. A particular opening seems to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is in some way essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
