Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh power to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply connected with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the original series, her actions and her path are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: gateways that seem to give on to alternate realities. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, designates these openings as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid logic and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical tussle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
