The Rose Field: Pullman's Gripping Conclusion to the His Dark Materials Trilogy

Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and failing."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are caught and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

His choice to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the church's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.

Like the first series, the heroine's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm

In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to suppress independence of thought, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The story starts with the finding of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the planet's sky: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. A particular opening manifests to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these openings as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict reason and return to intuition, yet, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is established.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

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