Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are caught and drinks is sipped, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by others as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm. Her private quest to reunite with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the central conflict in a broader battle with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to stifle independence of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that seem to open into different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, designates these openings as a threat to the institution's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid logic and return to instinct, however, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is in some way vital – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between purity and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
