Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh authority to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her fate are revealed to be inseparably woven with the future of the world. Her individual quest to reunite with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a wider battle with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of thought, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the discovery of a collection of curious fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to open into different dimensions. A particular opening manifests to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its helm, labels these openings as a problem to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid logic and back to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic struggle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the