The Rose Field: Pullman's Nail-Biting Ending to the His Dark Materials Series
Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the skies are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to security along a flooded river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the original series, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a wider war with an oppressive government which, as such regimes always have, is striving to stifle independence of reason, creativity and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story begins with the finding of a series of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, labels these portals as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
