Things are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the air are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and determined main character of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her animal guide, 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 go off in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to extend the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The extract is viewed by some as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her path are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her personal quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to quell autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of unusual cracks in the makeup of the planet's sky: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. One such portal seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a threat to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is somehow vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic conflict between innocence and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
