Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are taken and tea is sipped, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to extend the institution's control. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by various factions as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her personal quest to reunite with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a broader battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the finding of a series of unusual openings in the fabric of the Earth's sky: portals that look to give on to other worlds. One such portal appears to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, designates these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between purity and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
