🔗 Share this article

Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are faltering and failing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, buses are taken and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a marketable product, by others as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

Similar to the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her fate are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and regain her vision becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of strange cracks in the fabric of the planet's sky: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid reason and return to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is established.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

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