The Rose Field: Philip Pullman's Thrilling Conclusion to the Northern Lights Saga

Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are weakening and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This restraint is heightened 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.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to depart in search of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which appears somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably connected with the fate of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her private journey to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an oppressive regime which, as these systems typically do, is striving to suppress freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The story opens with the unveiling of a series of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that appear to lead to different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

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