Field of Roses: Pullman's Nail-Biting Conclusion to the His Dark Materials Series
Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are taken and beverages is consumed, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by some as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a set of curious openings in the fabric of the planet's air: windows that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular portal appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict logic and revert to intuition, however, her belief that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is in some way essential – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between innocence and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
