Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography aligns with 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 joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and beverages is consumed, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in search of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to expand the church's control. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her fate are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her individual mission to reunite with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle independence of reason, innovation and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a set of unusual cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that look to give on to other worlds. A particular window seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these portals as a threat to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is in some way crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
