Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, vehicles are caught and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to expand the institution's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world. Her personal mission to reunite with her soul and regain her vision becomes the key struggle in a larger battle with an authoritarian system which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to stifle freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the planet's sky: portals that look to lead to different dimensions. A particular opening manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
