Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to extend the religion's control. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her path are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to reunite with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle autonomy of thought, innovation and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the finding of a set of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that look to give on to different dimensions. One such opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, designates these portals as a problem to the church's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean tussle between innocence and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
