Things are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are taken and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by others as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like the original series, Lyra's choices and her fate are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a wider war with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to stifle independence of thinking, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the unveiling of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that seem to lead to different dimensions. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these portals as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and back to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between purity and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the