The Rose Field: Philip Pullman's Gripping Ending to the His Dark Materials Trilogy

Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and giving way."

Key Puzzle and Her Quest

Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound influence to expand the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world

In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her path are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a broader conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thinking, innovation and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The story starts with the discovery of a collection of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that look to lead to other worlds. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and return to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and knowledge is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

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