Things are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are caught and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in search of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to expand the church's control. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the original series, her choices and her destiny are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the discovery of a set of curious openings in the fabric of the Earth's sky: gateways that seem to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid reason and back to intuition, however, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
