The Rose Field: Philip Pullman's Thrilling Finale to the His Dark Materials Trilogy

Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."

Key Puzzle and Her Quest

Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, transports are caught and tea is drunk, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and determined heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound power to expand the church's control. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.

As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world. Her individual journey to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a larger battle with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to quell autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The novel starts with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's sky: portals that look to open into different dimensions. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is set.

Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the