Things are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and drinks is sipped, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound influence to extend the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby Lyra to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about his plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by some as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably connected with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her path are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to quell autonomy of thought, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the unveiling of a set of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's air: gateways that seem to give on to other worlds. One such window appears to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict logic and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between innocence and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
