Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh power to expand the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to security along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from that area. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling government which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story opens with the discovery of a set of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that look to lead to alternate realities. A particular window manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its helm, classifies these openings as a threat to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible logic and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between innocence and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
