Things are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, 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 the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The substance is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an controlling government which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, originality and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious fissures in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that look to open into different dimensions. A particular window seems to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these windows as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict reason and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their significance and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
