Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and drinks is sipped, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and determined heroine of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – 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 search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to extend the religion's dominium. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, Lyra's movements and her path are shown to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the central conflict in a larger war with an controlling government which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to quell freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the unveiling of a collection of curious fissures in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such window seems to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these openings as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and revert to feeling, yet, her certainty that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
