Field of Roses: Pullman's Nail-Biting Finale to the His Dark Materials Trilogy

Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are weakening and collapsing."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from that area. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable good, by others as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.

Like the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world

In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the central battleground in a larger war with an controlling system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles

The book starts with the unveiling of a series of curious fissures in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that look to open into other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid logic and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and their value is somehow vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

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