Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to security along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the original series, her movements and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a series of strange openings in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to give on to other worlds. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these portals as a threat to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
