Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and determined main character of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the church's control. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The oil is regarded by some as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of thought, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the discovery of a collection of strange openings in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: gateways that appear to lead to alternate realities. A particular window appears to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible logic and return to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
