🔗 Share this article

Things are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are faltering and failing."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and determined heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to depart in quest of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh influence to extend the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

Similar to the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, her actions and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her personal mission to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The novel begins with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: windows that look to give on to different dimensions. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to feeling, however, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and experience is prepared.

Narrative Pacing and Character Development

At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the