🔗 Share this article

Tings are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and giving way."

The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey

Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable commodity, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.

Like the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply connected with the fate of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to reconnect with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a wider war with an oppressive government which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to stifle independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The book starts with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular opening seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and experience is set.

Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the