Things are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
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, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound power to extend the religion's dominium. A key character, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from the region. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable product, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the original series, her movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the structure of the planet's air: gateways that look to lead to other worlds. An example of a window seems to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a challenge to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
