Things are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are taken and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and determined main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to extend the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from the region. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her fate are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her individual journey to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to suppress freedom of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the finding of a set of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that look to give on to alternate realities. One such window appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these openings as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
