Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to extend the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her private journey to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a larger war with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, innovation and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's sky: gateways that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict rationalism and revert to instinct, yet, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
