🔗 Share this article

Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are faltering and failing."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh influence to broaden the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The substance is regarded by various factions as a tradeable product, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world

In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her fate are revealed to be deeply woven with the destiny of the world. Her private mission to reunite with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a larger battle with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to quell freedom of thought, originality and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The novel opens with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the planet's air: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these portals as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and return to instinct, however, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.

Story Tempo and Character Development

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the