Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the air are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the church's High Council, and is set on using his newfound authority to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant Lyra to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to a key location to discover more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which appears somehow to be the source of a social and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable product, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her fate are shown to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her individual journey to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress autonomy of reason, originality and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the finding of a collection of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's sky: windows that look to give on to other worlds. A particular window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
