Rose Field Chronicles: Pullman's Gripping Conclusion to the His Dark Materials Saga

Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and giving way."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.

As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm

In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply woven with the future of the universe. Her personal mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key conflict in a wider conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to stifle independence of reason, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The novel opens with the finding of a set of curious fissures in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. One such portal appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and return to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is prepared.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

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