Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the original series, her actions and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to reunite with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a larger battle with an controlling regime which, as these systems typically do, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, innovation and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the finding of a series of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. An example of a window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict logic and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean tussle between naivety and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
