The Rose Field

Did You Know?

• The title refers to a field in the sense of a magnetic or gravitational field, first mentioned as Rusakov Field in the opening chapters of Northern Lights.
• Writing in The Guardian, Sarah Crown praised the author for bringing the trilogy to a complex and fitting end, though she considered the story circuitous in places.

Setting

The story takes place in a world dominated by the Magisterium, an international theocracy that suppresses heresy. Humans possess dæmons, sapient animal forms of their souls that exist outside the body. An alethiometer, a truth-telling symbol reader, serves as an important plot device. The novel immediately follows The Secret Commonwealth, with Lyra searching for her dæmon Pantalaimon and Malcolm searching for Lyra. It is set about twenty years after La Belle Sauvage and ten years after the conclusion of the His Dark Materials trilogy.

Plot

In the desert, Lyra's alethiometer is stolen; she recovers the needle, but a gryphon flies away with the gold body. She travels East, believing Pantalaimon is heading there as he searches for her imagination. In Aleppo, Lyra meets Mustafa Bey, a wealthy Turkish merchant who gives her a signed pass. At the Brazilian Embassy Gardens, Olivier Bonneville, son of Gerard Bonneville, attacks her; he has been tracking her with an alethiometer taken from the Magisterium.

Malcolm Polstead, guided by Oakley Street, arrives with guide Abdel Ionides. Lyra escapes Magisterium agents, Malcolm is carried off by a gryphon, and Ionides is captured but Lyra rescues him using the alethiometer needle. Lyra and Ionides travel East by bus until Mustafa Bey is murdered, voiding his passport. After a trade and currency collapse, they flee riots in Baku in a small fishing boat.

Meanwhile, the gryphons take Malcolm to their mountain retreat, where he poses as an artificer and promises to repair the alethiometer's gold case. Pan arrives on a small gryphon named Gulya, whom he saved from a giant bird; Gulya's size results from an enchantment by the sorcerer Sorush. Malcolm promises to help Gulya kill Sorush and liberate his gold. Tilda Vasara, head of the Northern witches, warns the gryphons of a crisis of the air caused by Magisterium explosive tests trying to close windows to other worlds.

At Pan's request, Tilda carries him East toward a red building. With the witches' help, Sorush is killed, Gulya grows to normal size, and the gryphons join the witches to halt the Magisterium armies marching to the same destination, unwillingly guided by Bonneville.

Conception

Pullman reported challenges writing the novel due to the COVID-19 pandemic and aging. He described writing by computer instead of on paper because of pain in his hand, stating he could not write this one by hand as he had for the previous 50 or 60 years. In another interview, he said the whole series took 30 years and that one does not undertake such a task unless one can do it with all one's being, including one's moral being.