Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are taken and drinks is consumed, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound authority to expand the religion's rule. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by some as a marketable product, by others as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the world. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and regain her vision becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to suppress independence of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book begins with the finding of a series of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow crucial – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
