Field of Roses: Pullman's Thrilling Conclusion to the Northern Lights Trilogy

Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

His choice to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound authority to extend the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued baby Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.

Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the original series, Lyra's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her personal journey to reunite with her soul and recover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, originality and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The book begins with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's air: portals that look to give on to alternate realities. A particular window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid reason and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between purity and knowledge is established.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the