Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to expand the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from that area. The extract is seen by some as a commercial good, by different parties as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply connected with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her path are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the central struggle in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that appear to give on to different dimensions. A particular opening seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and return to feeling, however, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and their value is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic conflict between innocence and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
