Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh power to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a tradeable product, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her path are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to suppress freedom of reason, innovation and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that look to open into different dimensions. One such portal seems to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these openings as a problem to the church's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid reason and back to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
