Rose Field Chronicles: Pullman's Gripping Ending to the Northern Lights Trilogy

Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are faltering and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, transports are taken and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave 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 quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to expand the institution's control. A key character, who carried young the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about his aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in the first series, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her personal journey to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to stifle autonomy of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The novel begins with the discovery of a set of curious cracks in the fabric of the Earth's sky: portals that look to open into alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict logic and back to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously vital – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

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