The Rose Field: Philip Pullman's Gripping Ending to the His Dark Materials Saga
Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the church's control. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a tradeable product, by others as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her individual journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: windows that look to open into other worlds. A particular window seems to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid reason and return to instinct, however, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic tussle between naivety and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
