🔗 Share this article

Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are faltering and failing."

Key Puzzle and Her Quest

Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to extend the church's dominium. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable product, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.

Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a larger war with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities always have, is striving to quell freedom of thinking, innovation and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts

The novel starts with the finding of a collection of strange cracks in the fabric of the planet's air: portals that appear to open into other worlds. A particular window manifests to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict reason and revert to feeling, however, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is somehow vital – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.

Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution

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