Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the religion's rule. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a social and financial crisis spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply connected with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her individual mission to reunite with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell autonomy of reason, originality and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book opens with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular window seems to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these portals as a threat to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible rationalism and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the