Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in creature form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are ridden and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to discover more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The oil is regarded by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her path are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these windows as a problem to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between innocence and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
