Field of Roses: Philip Pullman's Thrilling Finale to the Northern Lights Series

Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are faltering and giving way."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are caught and tea is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh influence to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial product, by others as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.

Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe

In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a wider battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to stifle autonomy of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of unusual openings in the structure of the Earth's air: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. A particular portal seems to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between purity and experience is prepared.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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