Things are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her private quest to rejoin with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell autonomy of reason, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the finding of a collection of curious fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that look to lead to other worlds. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
