Things are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and tea is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which appears somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her fate are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the realm. Her personal quest to reunite with her soul and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to quell independence of thought, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the fabric of the planet's air: portals that appear to open into alternate realities. One such portal manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible logic and return to instinct, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
