🔗 Share this article

Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and drinks is sipped, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

His choice to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the institution's control. Another protagonist, who carried infant the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm

In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The novel opens with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. A particular window seems to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these windows as a threat to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict rationalism and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously vital – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic tussle between naivety and maturity is set.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the