Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in search of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh power to expand the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to security along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from that area. The extract is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the future of the universe. Her private quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a wider war with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the finding of a series of strange openings in the fabric of the planet's air: portals that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these windows as a threat to the institution's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and back to feeling, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
