Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, transports are taken and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to extend the church's control. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be deeply connected with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her fate are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider war with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book starts with the unveiling of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that seem to open into alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible rationalism and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
