Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply connected with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her path are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a wider battle with an oppressive regime which, as these systems always have, is striving to suppress freedom of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the discovery of a collection of curious cracks in the fabric of the world's air: gateways that look to give on to other worlds. One such portal manifests to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and return to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
