Things are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle 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 picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her path are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of reason, originality and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the unveiling of a set of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to lead to alternate realities. One such opening appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these openings as a challenge to the church's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
