Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and drinks is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to expand the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the original series, her actions and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her personal quest to reunite with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a larger battle with an oppressive system which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. A particular opening seems to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and their value is in some way essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
