🔗 Share this article

Things are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the heavens are populated with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are ridden and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to leave in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the religion's control. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

Similar to the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe

In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her path are revealed to be inseparably woven with the future of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader battle with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle freedom 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 discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the fabric of the planet's air: portals that appear to lead to different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and return to feeling, however, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

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