Rose Field Chronicles: Pullman's Nail-Biting Ending to the Northern Lights Series

Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and failing."

Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey

Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound power to extend the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by some as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.

Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply connected with the fate of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a broader war with an oppressive government which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The book starts with the discovery of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: windows that look to give on to alternate realities. One such window appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and back to feeling, however, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and maturity is established.

Narrative Pacing and Character Development

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