Things are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by certain groups as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the original series, her choices and her fate are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a set of curious cracks in the structure of the world's sky: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these portals as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from strict logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
