Tings are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and determined heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound influence to expand the institution's control. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from that area. The substance is regarded by some as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to suppress freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a collection of unusual fissures in the structure of the Earth's sky: windows that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between innocence and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
