The Rose Field: Philip Pullman's Thrilling Conclusion to the Northern Lights Trilogy

Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and determined heroine of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by some as a tradeable product, by others as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the world

In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the world. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader conflict with an controlling government which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, originality and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The novel opens with the unveiling of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's sky: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. An example of a window appears to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her belief that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and experience is established.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

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