Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in beast form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to extend the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is regarded by various factions as a marketable product, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Like the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle autonomy of thinking, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the world's air: windows that seem to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window appears to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between purity and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
