Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound authority to extend the church's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her path are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to suppress autonomy of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the fabric of the planet's sky: portals that appear to open into different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to intuition, however, her belief that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
