Rose Field Chronicles: Pullman's Thrilling Ending to the Northern Lights Series

Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."

Key Puzzle and Her Quest

Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which seems in some way to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.

Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be deeply connected with the future of the realm

In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the original series, her choices and her fate are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a wider battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, innovation and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The story starts with the discovery of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the world's atmosphere: portals that appear to open into different dimensions. One such opening appears to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these openings as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible reason and return to feeling, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow vital – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic tussle between purity and experience is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

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