Things are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the institution's control. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is seen by some as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Like the original series, Lyra's movements and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to suppress freedom of thought, creativity and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that look to lead to different dimensions. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, yet, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
