Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's final excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from the region. The substance is regarded by various factions as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the world. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a broader battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell independence of thought, originality and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious openings in the fabric of the world's sky: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal seems to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to instinct, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic struggle between purity and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
