Rose Field Chronicles: Philip Pullman's Thrilling Conclusion to the His Dark Materials Saga

Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and tea is consumed, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

His choice to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world

In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her personal quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader battle with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle independence of reason, creativity and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts

The book opens with the unveiling of a collection of unusual openings in the makeup of the planet's air: gateways that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid logic and revert to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is established.

Narrative Pacing and Character Development

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