Field of Roses by Philip Pullman – a thrilling conclusion to the Northern Lights series | imaginary

TThe hinges fall apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second part of Philip Pullman’s brilliant trilogy set in a world that appears here more than ever as a skewed, skewed version of our own. Institutions fail, or reassemble themselves on new and troubling foundations. There is an invisible force that “destroys the air and the seasons”; Meanwhile, “money is going bad, and no one knows why.” Power flows away from governments, gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of cartels, and the hands of mobs. “Something is happening, very quietly, very subtly,” says merchant Mustafa Bey, watching the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo café. “Things that we thought were stable and solid become weaker and crumble.”

What that something might be, and how to confront it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman’s concluding foray into the complex and deceptive world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It is a world whose geography is compatible with the world of this world, but its history is compatible with our history. Where humans look, think, and act like us, but they are accompanied by demons, spirits in animal form; Where the sky is filled with witches and griffons, but beneath that sky, buses are caught, tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a child in La Belle Sauvage, the prologue with which Pullman begins Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still the prickly, stubborn heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This restriction is amplified by her separation from her demon, Pantalaimon – but ironically this was also the motivation that caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Pan’s decision to go in search of that childlike part of Lyra that she seems to have lost (a side he embodies with her “fantasy”), and her quest to meet him again, was instigated by the Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra make an itinerant journey across Europe and to the Caucasus, encountering wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were moving, and darker forces were at work. The Magisterium – the ruling authority of the Church, Pullman’s terrifying embodiment of strict bureaucratic evil – is now under new leadership, and is flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamarre – Lyra’s uncle, who blames her for his sister’s death – has maneuvered himself into the role of head of the Magisterium, intent on using his newfound power to expand the Church’s power. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby Lyra to safety along the flooded Thames as an 11-year-old at La Belle Sauvage, was now an Oxford student with a sideline in intelligence work: he had been sent to Geneva to find out more about Delamarre’s intentions. Behind all this lies the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil, which in one way or another seems to be the source of a social and economic crisis extending from Central Asia. Some view oil as a tradable commodity, others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and still others – the fanatical “mountain men” – as a source of evil; An insult that must be erased. The question of where it came from, what it represents, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is quickly coming to the fore.

In Secret Commonwealth, these storylines were largely parallel. In the rose field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, it is revealed that Lyra’s actions and fate are inextricably intertwined with the fate of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her demon and reclaim her imagination becomes the main battleground in a broader war with a totalitarian regime that seeks, as such regimes have always done, to suppress the independence of thought, creativity, and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.

The novel begins with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the fabric of Earth’s atmosphere: windows that seem to open doors to other worlds. One of these windows appears to be the source of the hotly disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, headed by Delamar, regards these windows as a challenge to Church doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move away from strict rationalism and back to intuition, her conviction that these sites must be protected – and that what they represent and what they offer are somehow essential – grows. “The dust, or rose oil, or fantasy, or rose field, or whatever we call it, we need it,” she says. The stage is set for Black’s struggle between innocence and experience.

At 640 pages, The Rose Field gives itself the time it needs to bring Pullman’s trilogy to a proper conclusion, but there are points where it seems to be working its way too obliquely to the end. Secondary characters are sometimes introduced without a specific purpose, and there are moments when apparent narrative progress turns into a dead end. But the internal engine of the story is strong enough to carry us through these digressions. Lyra’s journey into adulthood feels both painful and believable, and once again, Pullman uses her relationship with her demon to flesh out and explore her inner conflicts in a way that is unique to his fantasy world. Malcolm is an unexpectedly successful stand-in for Will, Lyra’s foil in the first trilogy: he is a rich, complete character in his own right, and his feelings for Lyra, and her feelings for him, provide a complex, adult view of the relationship between Will and Lyra in His Dark Materials. At the same time, Pullman’s uncanny ability to conjure place is once again evident: the snows of Svalbard and the chaos of Oxford’s rooftops are replaced by the sweeping deserts and towering mountains of the Silk Roads. And when we get there, the novel’s final confrontation is a very exciting ride.

However, endings are always difficult, and for Pullman, the challenge is compounded by the fact that His Dark Materials provided one of the most emotionally and intellectually satisfying conclusions in modern literature. In The Book of Dust, by contrast, there is a sense of threads left untied; The ends are just lightly tucked away. But this seems, in the final analysis, like a deliberate choice on Pullman’s part: the ultimate reversal of the fact that The Book of Dust is a story for adults, not children, and the endings of short stories are another casualty of the disposability of childish things. “There are no endings,” said Hilary Mantel on the last page of Bring Up the Bodies. “It’s all beginnings.” Pullman is coming to an end, but it’s clear that his characters and their stories will continue without him—and that the end of his book marks the beginning of the next chapter. Lyra says at the end of the novel: “We need the things that we cannot explain or prove, otherwise we will die of suffocation.” With The Book of Dust, Pullman gave us room to breathe.