Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and tea is consumed, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound power to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the universe. Her private journey to reunite with her companion and regain her vision becomes the central struggle in a larger war with an controlling government which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story opens with the unveiling of a set of curious fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that look to lead to other worlds. A particular portal manifests to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
