Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but below, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh power to broaden the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by others as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her personal journey to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book starts with the discovery of a collection of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that look to give on to other worlds. A particular portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their significance and their value is somehow crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic tussle between naivety and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
