Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the heavens are populated with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and determined heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in search of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from that area. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the future of the world. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the central struggle in a broader battle with an oppressive system which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to quell freedom of reason, originality and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the discovery of a set of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible logic and revert to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between purity and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
