The Rose Field: Pullman's Gripping Finale to the Northern Lights Trilogy

Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to leave in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh influence to extend the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to a key location to discover more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.

As in the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably entwined 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 His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a wider battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.

Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles

The book opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the structure of the planet's air: portals that appear to lead to other worlds. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its helm, classifies these portals as a challenge to the church's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible reason and return to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between purity and experience is prepared.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

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