Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in search of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from that area. The extract is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a wider battle with an oppressive government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the unveiling of a series of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: gateways that appear to open into different dimensions. A particular window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid reason and revert to intuition, yet, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between innocence and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
