Things are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and drinks is drunk, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's control. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to security along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an controlling government which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle independence of reason, innovation and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the discovery of a series of curious cracks in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into other worlds. One such portal seems to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
