Field of Roses: Philip Pullman's Gripping Conclusion to the His Dark Materials Trilogy

Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are faltering and giving way."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in animal form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and determined main character of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to depart in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the religion's control. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a marketable good, by different parties as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her personal quest to reunite with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the key conflict in a broader war with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, innovation and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The story opens with the finding of a series of unusual openings in the structure of the world's air: windows that seem to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window seems to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these openings as a threat to the church's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and return to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between naivety and knowledge is established.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the