Rose Field Chronicles: Philip Pullman's Nail-Biting Conclusion to the His Dark Materials Series

Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are weakening and giving way."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world

In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the future of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger battle with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to suppress autonomy of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The story starts with the discovery of a collection of curious openings in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: gateways that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular opening seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and maturity is prepared.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

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