Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are shown to be deeply connected with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to suppress freedom of reason, innovation and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the discovery of a set of unusual openings in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: windows that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these portals as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between purity and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
