Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound influence to broaden the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable good, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her companion and regain her vision becomes the key struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems always have, is striving to suppress independence of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that look to open into other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict reason and return to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between innocence and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
