Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from that area. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, creativity and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the discovery of a collection of curious fissures in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. One such opening seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, designates these portals as a threat to the institution's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and back to intuition, yet, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and their value is in some way vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
