Field of Roses: Pullman's Nail-Biting Ending to the His Dark Materials Series
Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are ridden and tea is sipped, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to learn more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her fate are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her individual journey to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story starts with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such opening seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between naivety and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the