Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is sipped, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the church's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who saved baby Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by some as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Like the original series, the protagonist's actions and her fate are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a larger battle with an controlling system which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell freedom of reason, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book opens with the discovery of a collection of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that look to lead to other worlds. A particular portal manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to feeling, however, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their significance and their value is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
