Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are caught and beverages is sipped, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to expand the institution's control. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her choices and her fate are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the world. Her individual quest to reconnect with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a broader battle with an oppressive government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, labels these openings as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible reason and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between purity and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
