Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her choices and her path are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world. Her individual journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a broader war with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book opens with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the planet's air: windows that appear to open into other worlds. An example of a opening seems to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid rationalism and return to instinct, however, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
