Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in search of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, her movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the world. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to stifle freedom of thinking, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that seem to open into other worlds. An example of a window appears to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
