Things are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's High Council, and is set on using his newfound authority to broaden the institution's control. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's sky: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these portals as a challenge to the church's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and back to instinct, yet, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean tussle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
