Things are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, warier, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the church's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to broaden the institution's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to security along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the original series, Lyra's choices and her fate are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the universe. Her private journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to stifle independence of thinking, originality and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the unveiling of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that look to open into other worlds. An example of a window appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic tussle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
