Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound power to expand the church's rule. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe. Her personal journey to reconnect with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a broader conflict with an oppressive system which, as these systems always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of unusual cracks in the fabric of the Earth's sky: portals that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to feeling, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
