Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in creature form; where the air are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and tea is sipped, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to security along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a tradeable product, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the fate of the realm. Her private quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is striving to quell independence of thinking, originality and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story begins with the unveiling of a set of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to open into different dimensions. A particular portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these portals as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid logic and return to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
