Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are caught and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to extend the church's rule. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is seen by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be deeply connected with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is seeking to quell independence of thought, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a collection of curious cracks in the fabric of the world's sky: portals that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, designates these openings as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to feeling, yet, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is in some way essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
