Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the church's control. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which appears in some way to be the source of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by some as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably connected with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to reconnect with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book opens with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the planet's air: gateways that look to open into other worlds. A particular window seems to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
