🔗 Share this article

Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

His choice to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to extend the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.

Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the fate of the universe

In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a broader battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell independence of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts

The story starts with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to give on to alternate realities. A particular window manifests to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and back to feeling, yet, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between purity and experience is established.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the