Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to extend the church's rule. A key character, who carried baby the heroine to security along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her personal journey to reconnect with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell independence of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book starts with the unveiling of a series of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to lead to alternate realities. One such window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a threat to the institution's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
