Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound power to expand the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The extract is regarded by some as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's actions and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the central battleground in a broader conflict with an controlling system which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the finding of a collection of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that seem to lead to alternate realities. One such opening appears to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean tussle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
