Tings are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's control. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her path are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, creativity and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that look to give on to different dimensions. One such window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its helm, designates these portals as a threat to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict rationalism and return to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
