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

Things are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and giving way."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials 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 young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more careful, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to go off in search of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to extend the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.

Like the first series, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the realm

In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her path are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to suppress independence of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.

Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles

The novel begins with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the world's air: windows that look to open into different dimensions. One such portal seems to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict reason and revert to instinct, yet, her belief that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between innocence and maturity is prepared.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the