🔗 Share this article

Tings are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and beverages is sipped, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, warier, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which seems somehow to be the source of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from that area. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the world

In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling system which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to quell autonomy of thought, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The story starts with the unveiling of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to open into other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible reason and return to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the