Rose Field Chronicles: Pullman's Thrilling Conclusion to the His Dark Materials Series

Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

Pan's decision to go off in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the church's governing body, and is set on using his newfound influence to expand the church's control. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

Similar to the first series, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, her actions and her path are shown to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her personal mission to reconnect with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the central battleground in a larger battle with an oppressive government which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. One such portal appears to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict logic and return to feeling, yet, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is established.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the