Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in quest of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to expand the institution's control. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which appears somehow to be the source of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by others as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her private mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an controlling system which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell autonomy of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story begins with the unveiling of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible logic and return to instinct, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between naivety and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
