Things are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are caught and beverages is sipped, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and determined heroine of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound power to broaden the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by others as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a larger battle with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the structure of the world's air: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. One such portal manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible logic and back to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and their value is somehow vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between naivety and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
