Things are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are caught and tea is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This limitation is amplified 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.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh power to extend the church's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young Lyra to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the source of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the original series, Lyra's choices and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle independence of reason, originality and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that appear to lead to other worlds. A particular opening manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between purity and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
