🔗 Share this article

Things are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.

As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to reunite with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the central conflict in a larger battle with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to stifle independence of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts

The book opens with the discovery of a series of curious openings in the structure of the planet's air: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. One such portal appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their significance and their value is in some way essential – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the