Things are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to security along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the original series, her movements and her fate are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe. Her individual journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a larger war with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell autonomy of thought, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that look to lead to other worlds. A particular window manifests to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic struggle between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
