Rose Field Chronicles: Pullman's Nail-Biting Conclusion to the Northern Lights Saga

Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."

Key Puzzle and Her Quest

Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and determined main character of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is seen by various factions as a marketable commodity, by others as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

As in the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm

In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are shown to be deeply woven with the fate of the world. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader battle with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The novel starts with the unveiling of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that look to give on to other worlds. One such portal seems to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between naivety and experience is set.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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