Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by some as a commercial product, by others as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, Lyra's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, her choices and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a wider war with an controlling system which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to suppress freedom of thinking, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the structure of the world's sky: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. A particular portal seems to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these portals as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic tussle between innocence and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
