Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
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, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are caught and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, 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 origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a broader war with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is striving to suppress autonomy of thinking, creativity and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story opens with the discovery of a collection of unusual openings in the makeup of the planet's sky: windows that appear to open into other worlds. One such portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid rationalism and return to feeling, yet, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
