Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his newfound authority to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a flooded river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world. Her personal journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a larger war with an controlling regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a collection of unusual openings in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these openings as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and return to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between purity and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
