Tings are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to expand the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's actions and her path are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world. Her individual mission to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an oppressive regime which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to different dimensions. One such portal appears to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the