🔗 Share this article

Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and Her Quest

Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but below, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to leave in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to extend the religion's control. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by different parties as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world

In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her path are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe. Her personal mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress freedom of thought, originality and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The book begins with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the planet's sky: windows that appear to open into alternate realities. One such portal appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its helm, designates these portals as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict reason and return to instinct, yet, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic tussle between naivety and knowledge is established.

Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution

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