🔗 Share this article

Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and failing."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from the region. The substance is regarded by some as a marketable product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm

In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her path are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her soul and regain her vision becomes the key conflict in a broader battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell autonomy of thinking, innovation and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The book starts with the unveiling of a set of curious openings in the structure of the world's air: portals that look to give on to alternate realities. A particular window manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict rationalism and return to feeling, yet, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their significance and their value is somehow vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is established.

Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution

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